How to learn to love a new landscapehttps://www.hcn.org/articles/northwest-how-to-learn-to-love-a-new-landscape
A writer trades in the ‘crack-me-open ache of space’ in Colorado for the lushness of western Oregon.This essay originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing, and is republished here with permission.

I never meant for this to happen.

When I moved to the Pacific Northwest from arid Colorado three years ago, I was one of those people who insisted on horizons.

The town where I was born is a place where the foothills of the Rockies stand like a cliffy coastline overlooking a dry sea of plains. From their height, you can watch the change of light roll through the day like surf, can see storms so far away that lightning comes without sound — a flicker on the dark edge of awareness.

Even now, if you asked me what landscape makes me feel so big and free that I might crack right in half, I would say alpine tundra — the naked, velvet crowns of our sky islands, with their pikas and marmots and ptarmigan, with their cushion plants smaller than mixing bowls but older than I’ll ever be.

When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, I worried that all this lush and green would make me soft. My friend Ben told me that the first thing I’d notice was how nice everyone’s skin is, compared to the weathered hide that passes for such on we Coloradans. Western Oregon, after all, is a place insulated from the UV glare of the sun by a few thousand extra feet of atmosphere, by dozens of extra days of cloudcover, by air so thick with moisture that it’s practically water. Indeed, as soon as I arrived, I spent a lot less money on lotion. My blood pressure mysteriously dropped 20 points and stayed there.

When I wandered nearby hiking trails in the rolling Coast Range or the foothills of Mount Hood, I had to crane my neck and peer straight up if I wanted to see the sky, broken into scattered shards of blue by swaying conifers. The variety jumbled in all that sameness of electric-bright leaves and needles and moss disoriented my senses. Mushroom hunting in the deep woods, I’d mistake one draw for another, and stroll down a loamy slope onto the wrong forest road, then have to retrace my steps through the vine maple and stabby Oregon grape to find where I’d parked my truck.

I felt that I had sunk to the bottom of the sea, my view closed to a small, murky circle that lost resolution beyond 10 or 20 feet. I understood my leaving home to be a kind of death, a drowning, and I longed for the surface. For the horizon. For the crack-me-open ache of space, spreading away.

And then, somehow, not long ago, my eyes adjusted. In all that wandering the woods searching for the sky, I began to see the trees that blocked it. It was not an accident exactly. I’d been researching and writing stories about forest policies. About the people who lived from forests. About forests themselves. About animals made of salmon who dragged salmon inland to make trees out of salmon.

I understood my leaving home to be a kind of death, a drowning, and I longed for the surface.

As I became literate in the landscape I had chosen on an uncertain whim — a strip of profligate vegetative growth that stretches all the way to Alaska — I learned to shape with my mouth some of the more recent names for its living things. I climbed into the low crooks of western redcedars that seemed big around as houses and that, for millennia, have clothed and sheltered and transported the people of these shores and forests. I skittered along slick boardwalks, shlorped through mud and planned 500-mile drives to visit yellowcedar groves. I hugged huge Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, pressing my weathered Colorado cheek and the tinny clock of my heartbeat against the slower, deep-thrum-bass clock of the trees’ life — each hidden interior ring, a physical memory of what it was like in this very spot during one circle of our planet around its sun.

I didn’t know I had changed, though, until I found myself dumbstruck by a simple fact while interviewing a naturalist: Western redcedars are relatively recent arrivals to the upper western margin of North America. And some ancient cedars still living in the islands of southeast Alaska may be the very first of their kind to ever have seeded there. As I recognized their presence as part of a slow, sweeping movement, I felt an expansive sense of time and change that echoed the expansiveness of space native to the mountains and plains where I first laid eyes on the world.

“In Norse mythology,” the landscape writer and glossarist Robert MacFarlane recently wrote in his Twitter feed,Yggdrasilis “the ancient ash tree at the cosmos’s centre, the branches & roots of which connect different realms & times.” Perhaps so with redcedar too, I thought, from the precarious perch of my new and limited knowing.

I never meant for this to happen.

I never meant to be one of those people who would trade redrock bones of desert and mountain crags and the velvet nakedness of tundra for the claustrophobic press of forest. For a place so green and eager to grow that if you sit still too long you’ll be mossed and brambled over, just another soft shapeless lump at the toes of giants.

And maybe I’m still not one of those people.

All I know is that now, when I touch the skin of a cedar, I feel, if not at home, then rooted in my own body – looking for the piece of earth where the restless center of me stills at last, and begins to grow.

Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor for High Country News and a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She intermittently posts bylines on her website. Follow @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherNorthwestForestsOregonDesertColoradoEssaysAlpine2018/02/09 17:55:00 GMT-6ArticleThe fight to save vaquitas from extinctionhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/ocean-wildlife-the-fight-to-save-vaquitas-from-extinction
Through a tangle of corruption and overfishing, a marine species hangs in the balance.This article was originally published at Hakai Magazine.

In April, Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California is a place of light. Nothing blocks the sun on its arc across the sky. It glares from the green water, and beams off the pale desert and buckled mountain ranges to the west. It foils wide hat brims, burns through shirts, sears the insides of nostrils. It bleaches the very air.

And on this still day, its bright fingers wring the color from several carcasses tangled in a drifting net. The MV Farley Mowat, a 34-meter ship that belongs to the environmental group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, turned up the mess while on a special patrol for the Mexican government. Crew members watch their grim find twist in the water for three hours before a Mexican Navy boat arrives to take over. A half dozen military and environment officials mill on its foredeck and roof. Another man, his face wrapped in a camouflage bandana and his arm cradling a machine gun, stands watch in the stern — like a period at the end of a sentence of warning.

At last, two of the officials tangle their fists in the mesh.

What they heave from the sea is so dead it’s almost spectral: boluses of white flesh dangle from backbones thick as arms, and gaping jaws tear away as if attached with wet toilet paper. As the men discard rotten parts and slowly haul in the net, three fresher, silver bodies surface, revealing the carcasses’ identity: totoaba, a species of endangered fish that can grow to be the size of a large man.

In the early 1900s, totoabas were so plentiful here that they helped spawn the primary fishing communities of the Upper Gulf, including San Felipe, a sprawl of buildings and potholed roads that lines the nearshore. By 1975, though, damming on the Colorado River had irrevocably altered totoaba spawning habitat, and fishermen had nearly obliterated the species for its meat and its swim bladder, which fetched a premium for its use in Chinese medicinal soup. That year, Mexico made it illegal to catch the fish, followed soon after by international and US law. But today’s net is a hint that the trade has surged back to ravenous life. It’s not yet clear what that means for totoabas: the first survey of recovering stocks is only now underway.

What is clear is that the nets destroy much more than their intended catch. And their reappearance has made stark the fatal cracks in a longstanding effort to save another creature, one that is much harder to see, and getting more difficult to find every day: the vaquita marina.

Spanish for little cow of the sea, the vaquita marina is the world’s smallest and rarest cetacean. It is endemic to the Upper Gulf and occupies just 4,000 square kilometers of ocean, anchored by a guano-whitewashed pyramid of granite called Rocas Consag, east of San Felipe. Its plump body is gracefully tapered, reaching up to 1.5 meters, and its black-ringed eyes have drawn panda comparisons. Mexico’s chief vaquita scientist, Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, and a colleague once described the porpoise’s upturned mouth as “a haunting little smile: Mona Lisa with black lipstick.”

Despite the Upper Gulf’s relentless light, the vaquita exists almost entirely in shadow. Most of what’s understood about the animal’s life is understood from its death. The vaquita was only described as a species in the 1950s, after three skulls washed up near San Felipe. The only photographs showing the animal’s full body are of corpses. When a living vaquita does appear, it tends to be in the distance as a quick slash of dorsal fin. Unlike dolphins, the porpoise shuns motors, travels solo or in pairs, and spends little time at the surface except to breathe. “You know it’s a vaquita,” one fisherman told me, “because you don’t see it again.”

In this rare footage captured in October 2008 by videographer Chris Johnson, live vaquitas slice slowly through the Upper Gulf of California. Video taken under permit (Oficio No. DR/847/08) from the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP)/Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) within a natural protected area subject to management decreed as such by the Mexican Government.

Still, the animal’s downward trend was clear enough that the Mexican government designated the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve to protect it and the totoaba in 1993. In 1997, the first reliable visual survey revealed there were fewer than 600 vaquitas.

The hard use of the once-flush Colorado River, mostly by thirsty US farmers and cities, was an obvious possible culprit. Over the past 50 years, it has seldom reached its mouth at the apogee of the Upper Gulf, starving the area of river-delivered nutrients, sediments, and fresh water. And yet, while the scientific community still debates the nature and extent of impacts on fish and other species, the Upper Gulf remains a stubbornly rich and astoundingly biodiverse environment. Powerful currents and tides churn up older nutrients deposited by the river and bring in others from the Pacific, which in turn help support clouds of plankton that sustain an intricate food web knotted with whales, sea turtles, and sharks, and pearled with numerous endemic marine species.

When scientists have examined dead vaquitas, they have consistently found them fat with fish and squid. When scientists tested their blubber, they found it relatively unburdened by the chemical contaminants that have accumulated in marine mammals elsewhere. When scientists investigated vaquitas’ lack of genetic diversity, they determined the animals had been relatively rare for a long time, suggesting that inbreeding depression wasn’t responsible for the decline.

The same year as the visual survey, the then-new International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, or CIRVA, concluded that another beneficiary of the Gulf’s bounty posed the most immediate threat to the porpoise: the fishing industry. Independent by-catch studies analyzing data from the 1980s and ’90s showed that vaquitas drowned at unsustainable rates in the gill nets that small-scale, or artisanal, fishermen strung like curtains through the water from fiberglass boats called pangas. Because of their size, vaquitas were particularly vulnerable to large-gauge nets set for bigger fish — especially those for totoabas, which still fed a low-level black market trade. Yet vaquitas also tangled in small-gauge gill nets designed for tiny quarry like shrimp, a major economic staple for local communities, especially after the legal totoaba fishery crashed.

Nearly from the beginning, CIRVA — an ad hoc team of national and international scientists, Mexican officials, NGO representatives, and other experts — found that a complete gill net ban would be necessary to ensure that vaquitas survived in their limited range, only part of which fell inside the original reserve. In the years that followed, the Mexican government stopped short of that, but poured resources into another vaquita refuge where certain large-gauge gill nets were banned. Later, it introduced a sweeping proposal for a gill net phaseout, programs to develop vaquita-friendly gear to replace nets, and initiatives to buy out some fishermen’s permits and gear and help them shift to different work.

Mark Garrison/Hakai Magazine

The conservation efforts were ambitious but troubled, and the gill net phaseout stalled. Different work isn’t necessarily easy to find in rural Mexico, and in multigenerational fishing families where many men started fishing as adolescents, continuing the practice is about identity and inertia, as well as income. While the buyouts succeeded in reducing the number of active pangas, only fishermen ready to retire or with other skills opted for them, and voluntary participation petered out quickly. Those who tried to transition to tourism businesses had to contend with the 2008 global economic recession. Meanwhile, new fishing regulations were often confusing, enforcement of restrictions and reserves was spotty at best, illegal fishing was common within reserve boundaries, and corruption was rampant. In 2005, for example, the Mexican government gave the Upper Gulf states of Baja California and Sonora $1 million to implement vaquita conservation actions within the new refuge. Instead, local authorities spent the money elsewhere, including on new outboard motors for fishermen.

Attempts to develop vaquita-safe equipment also dragged out for years, leaving fishermen marooned without a solid alternative to nets. The National Fisheries and Aquaculture Institute focused much of its attention on a small shrimp trawl, at times testing it during the wrong season or running out of money before tests were complete. Some fishermen sabotaged efforts by stringing nets in the way. Even now the trawl’s viability remains unclear: it requires more expertise to use, can add significant fuel costs, and may catch commercial quantities of shrimp only in some areas. Linking fishermen to customers willing to pay more for a vaquita-friendly product could solve some of those problems, but the government was also slow to issue permits, continually delaying a program to switch fishermen to the trawl. By 2015, when most of the Upper Gulf’s 650 shrimp pangas were supposed to have transitioned, only a fraction had.

Still, CIRVA scientists had hoped a summer vaquita monitoring effort that expanded in 2011 would reveal that the decline was at least slowing. Instead, their network of dozens of underwater acoustic devices — which they use to estimate population trends based on vaquita vocalizations — revealed exactly the opposite. The species’ nosedive became a free fall, more than quadrupling to 34 percent annually.

Reports trickling back to the scientists explained why. Whatever gains the stuttering conservation efforts had achieved were rapidly being erased by the massive expansion of the black market totoaba fishery around 2012. According to a 2016 report published by the Environmental Investigation Agency, the price for totoaba swim bladder — known as buche in Mexico — had exploded in China, where vendors marketed it to members of a growing middle class as a replacement for the prized bladder of a nearly extinct Chinese croaker fish. Fishermen in Mexico reportedly received as much as $8,500 per kilo (a good-sized bladder might weigh 400 to 500 grams), earning buche the nickname “aquatic cocaine.” Given the payback, it’s no surprise that investigators suspect the involvement of organized crime, including drug cartels.

In April 2015, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto responded to the new threat by enacting an emergency two-year gill net ban throughout the vaquita’s range and initiating a $74-million program to compensate fishermen for lost income during that period. The Mexican Navy, the army, and local police would help environmental authorities go after poachers.

But this massive undertaking came so late in the game that its chances of success were slim, and the same issues that had undermined previous efforts continued alongside the illegal trade, increasing local frustration. Money was distributed unevenly, thanks to corruption and mismanagement, leaving many fishermen short, and those who used the shrimp trawl were paid significantly less. Because they weren’t using nets, they were technically allowed to fish, but the government still barred them from working the sea — a combination that both penalized them for helping protect the vaquita and further delayed the transition to alternative gear. A special international alternative gear committee struggled to get the government to listen to testing advice, or even issue permits for the trawl or other gear.

Meanwhile, the vaquita population fell to just 30 by the autumn of 2016.

“To be honest, the analysis every year is easier and easier,” says acoustic researcher Armando Jaramillo-Legorreta, who works with Rojas-Bracho at Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, when I meet him in Ensenada, on Baja’s Pacific Coast. “Because you run the algorithm, and the arrow goes shwfftt.” He laughs darkly and plunges his hand downward, as if drawing a line graph of vaquita demise. “Zero. Zero. Zero.”

“Nights at anchor in the Gulf are quiet and strange,” John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts wrote of the Gulf of California in 1941. “Whatever makes one aware that men are about is not there.”

Seventy-six years later, aboard Sea Shepherd’s 55-meter MV Sam Simon, the first part is still true. The conservation group dispatched the ship to the Upper Gulf along with the Farley Mowat to aid Mexican authorities last December. Now, it loops through the water so slowly that the orange moon seems to transcribe circles around the mast. Gulls blink in and out of the ship’s dim glow, while pelicans waddle-swim by on the swells, as herky-jerky and Cretaceous as puppet pterodactyls.

The Sam Simon crew, though, is certainly aware that there are men in the Gulf tonight.

On the bridge, indy rock music twangs through the speakers as the first mate and bosun lean over the radar console in the dark, tracking the progress of a handful of pangas. One has been stopped for several minutes, which means its occupants may be checking totoaba nets.

Outside, volunteer crew member Jack Hutton, 19, climbs onto the deck, his face lit by the smartphone clipped to a console. Hutton races drones back home in Northern Ireland and once crashed his custom model into a tree while going for an airspeed record. Now, he flies a night-vision drone over the panga to check for contraband. But the panga races away.

“All I want is some friends!” Hutton jokes as he chases them with the drone. Two of the hooded figures aboard the panga hurl whatever they can grab at the drone—bottles, lead fishing weights, fish chunks. Twice, the panga pauses out of drone range and then creeps toward its original location. The bosun, Giacomo Giorgi, a heavily tattooed former hardcore punk musician from Italy, shakes his head in disbelief: “He’s tiptoeing back like no one is watching.”

These repeated forays are just one sign of poachers’ boldness. Sam Simon captain Oona Layolle, a French citizen, and other crew members have heard pangas motor close to the Sam Simon and the Farley Mowat at night. Others have sped away with boats full of totoabas in broad daylight, despite the presence of Sea Shepherd drones.

When 34-year-old Layolle first arrived in San Felipe in a Sea Shepherd sailboat the month before Nieto’s 2015 announcement, though, the totoaba poaching was still masked by poorly regulated fishing for shrimp and other species. She had hoped to capture vaquita footage to raise awareness of its plight. Instead, she found so many gill nets strung through the refuge that she couldn’t navigate. She reached out to Rojas-Bracho — now the chair of CIRVA — and others hoping to help.

At first, the scientists kept her at a distance. Though Sea Shepherd has recently focused on fighting illegal fishing, it’s best known for its anti-whaling campaigns, some of which have resulted in ship chases and collisions. The international nonprofit has been sued for allegedly sinking its own boat as a publicity stunt and has on occasion excoriated Indigenous peoples exercising their subsistence whaling and sealing rights in North America.

Rojas-Bracho’s work was already extremely delicate politically: when he started studying vaquitas in the mid-1990s, even many Mexican government officials needed to be convinced that the species existed. And he has always been clear that vaquita conservation efforts mustn’t exclude or demonize fishermen.

But Layolle persisted, and eventually Rojas-Bracho met her for coffee. “I discovered one of the most charming, intelligent persons,” he says now. “It was nothing like the documentaries.”

Layolle also began asking people in San Felipe directly about totoabas. The poachers, she learned, were anchoring large-gauge nets — a few meters tall and some stretching around a kilometer long — to the Gulf’s murky bottom. Some of the men would take a GPS reading, and then use grappling hooks to snag the net up later, pull in any fish, and release it back to the deep.

When a dead baby humpback whale tangled in a totoaba net turned up adrift in the Gulf on Christmas 2015, Layolle approached Mexican authorities with an idea. Sea Shepherd would use its ships and the poachers’ own grappling-hook methods to beat them at their game. That program began in February 2016.

Operation Milagro — or miracle — as it’s called, is now in its third official season. The Sam Simon and Farley Mowat tick back and forth off the coast of San Felipe between Rocas Consag and a black pyramidal hill on the coast called Cerro El Machorro — fishermen’s name for juvenile totoabas — each winter and spring when the totoabas arrive in the Upper Gulf to spawn. When one of the ships snags a net with its grappling hooks, the hooks break away from its gunwales with marking buoys, and the crew lowers a small boat into the water to haul in the net. Rojas-Bracho’s lab also leads a collaboration with a group of local fishermen, Mexican environmental authorities, Sea Shepherd, and others to drag for abandoned — or ghost — nets.

So far, by Sea Shepherd’s accounting, the two projects have pulled up nearly 500 pieces of illegal fishing gear, about three quarters of it set for totoabas. Piles of nets stacked on the Sam Simon’s back deck impregnate crew members’ clothes with a mildewy fish stench as they cut them up for recycling, to ensure they don’t end up back in the water. If officials had any doubts about the extent of illegal fishing before Operation Milagro began, they certainly don’t now.

But there’s little sign that Operation Milagro — even with the international media attention it’s garnered — has deterred poachers. “All these huge efforts are still not enough to save the vaquita,” says Layolle, who is taking a break from Sea Shepherd this fall. “It never stops. The totoaba trafficking never stops.”

According to Mexican Navy statistics, the agency has inspected thousands of boats and vehicles, and apprehended nearly 200 people since stepped-up enforcement began in 2015. But, as of this spring, there were no available reports of anyone being prosecuted. The navy often takes hours to respond to tips supplied by Sea Shepherd and others, and sometimes doesn’t show up at all. And the government only recently began adopting common-sense policies that could reduce the complications of chasing poachers on the open sea. It was just this April when it formalized a law that makes penalties stiff enough to act as deterrents. And it wasn’t until June that it adopted blanket restrictions on night fishing and boat launch locations, as well as requirements for tracking devices on small vessels. Those measures were part of an agreement to finally make the gill net ban permanent and extend the compensation program.

Meanwhile, the rogue nets have kept coming, their contents like some macabre survey of the Gulf’s storied diversity: whales, sea lions, dolphins, great white sharks, hammerheads, dozens of different kinds of fish, including hundreds of totoabas. Six vaquitas turned up dead this past season, too, half with telltale net-mesh patterns incised on their skin.

Proclamations of doom for the vaquita have been common in articles covering the species for at least a decade. But now, it seems certain that the porpoise has one last bid at survival.

Sea Shepherd volunteers Loïc Le Gars and Emillie Reader, deckhands on the Sam Simon during a season of Operation Milagro, haul in an illegal totoaba net.

Sarah Gilman/Hakai Magazine

This October, Mexico’s Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, or SEMARNAT, plans to launch a Hail Mary that will cost more than $5-million in 2017 alone to round up as many vaquitas as possible, and hold them in captivity for as long as it takes to make their habitat safe. Scientists, veterinarians, and experts from organizations in Mexico, the United States, and other countries hope to find them by using acoustic monitors, visual observers, and trained US Navy dolphins. Then, they’ll place nets in their path, and if they can catch them, immediately disentangle them and transport them to temporary open-water enclosures in the Upper Gulf until a more permanent sanctuary can be developed. It’s risky: not all porpoise species tolerate captivity. Even if vaquitas turn out to be among those that do, little is known about what they need to thrive and breed. “We have to be incredibly rapid students of how to deal with fully captive populations and be in there for the long term,” says Barbara Taylor, lead of the US-based Southwest Fisheries Science Center’s Marine Mammal Genetics Program and a key member of CIRVA. “It’s going to be decades.”

It’s unclear how many vaquitas will be left to catch. This past spring, Jaramillo-Legorreta quietly deployed a handful of acoustic monitors a few months earlier than usual. Then, not long before vaquitas reached peak media visibility in June — with US movie star Leonardo DiCaprio and Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, throwing their weight behind vaquita conservation efforts — CIRVA revealed that the creatures had all but disappeared. The monitors detected vaquitas only twice, far fewer times than anticipated. Until results are in from this summer’s full monitoring effort, “the data are hard to interpret,” Taylor says. But they “make us very worried.”

San Felipe, in April, is an oasis of activity in an otherwise silent desert. On the first weekend of the month, tourists pour into the town of 25,000 to watch tricked-out pickups and motorcycles roar through the San Felipe 250 off-road race. On the third weekend of the month, Easter weekend, still more tourists fill the beaches and the waterfront esplanade. Banda music vibrates the air, and couples lean into each other at a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe that overlooks the sea from a promontory scattered with plastic cups and silk flowers.

On the weekend between, Rafael Sánchez Gastélum’s house on the outskirts of town is a comparative island of calm. Sánchez Gastélum sits in the shade of a wooden awning, while his son Job and his brother Alejandro scoop corvinas from a small cooler onto a plastic table, then deftly shear off flanks of blood-edged pinkish meat. Pickups occasionally pause on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, and Alejandro weighs out sacks of the fillets on a scale, then passes them through windows in exchange for neatly folded pesos.

The brothers are among about 50 or so San Felipe fishermen who have taken sporadic jobs helping with ghost net removal and vaquita monitoring efforts, and like many people here, both still depend heavily on fishing. At just 33, Rafael has already worked on the water for 20 years, guiding sport fishermen and pulling in shrimp, first with a gill net and, more recently, with one of the small shrimp trawls, which he drags from his panga. Members of Rafael’s fishing co-op were among those shorted by the program to compensate fishermen for lost income. And Alejandro was left out entirely, forcing him to string together other sources of income, like the corvinas he’s selling today. Typically, the species — one of the most important to the local fishing industry — is exempt from the gill net ban, because it’s caught in a purse seine, yet the fishery remained closed this year for technical reasons, leaving fishermen with even fewer options. Alejandro caught today’s fish on a line instead. “It’s totally fucked,” Rafael says bluntly, through a translator. “The people here live from fishing … there’s no work now.”

It’s easy to see that every economic opportunity counts in San Felipe. April’s tourism boom is more exception than norm, and though the global economic recession has ebbed, abandoned houses and closed businesses are still abundant, and half-built, skeletal hotels loom along the shore. As the tensions escalated this spring with the closure of the corvina fishery and the lead-up to the permanent gill net ban, fishermen in Golfo de Santa Clara — a smaller Upper Gulf community that is almost wholly dependent on fishing — burned 15 government vehicles and patrol boats and beat some officials. And after an international coalition of NGOs began pushing a blanket Mexican shrimp boycott on vaquitas’ behalf, Sunshine Antonio Rodriguez, a co-op owner and the leader of a large local fishing federation, led a protest in San Felipe, where a panga inscribed with “Sea Shepherd” and “SEMARNAT” was burned in effigy. He also warned that hundreds of pangas would go after Sea Shepherd’s ships if they didn’t leave within five days, which landed him a restraining order.

“Did we threaten them? Yes we did,” Rodriguez explains when I meet him at his RV resort in San Felipe. “Because in a matter of speaking, all the other NGOs are threatening Mexico and the fishing industry. They’re judging all fishermen as equal. To me, that’s a declaration of war.”

Clad in a red polo shirt and an expensive-looking watch, Rodriguez — who gave up fishing to focus on other businesses years ago — ticks off a series of arguments. There’s never been proof that shrimp gill nets kill vaquitas, he says. It’s the damming of the Colorado River, he says, or chemical spills from an open-pit gold mine north of the city. He stops short of claiming that vaquitas aren’t real, but adds that he’d like to have a DNA test done. “What if it’s a malformation of a dolphin?”

A dead vaquita is displayed on a mound of net.

Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures/WWF

None of this bodes well for vaquitas: a significant number of San Felipe residents still don’t believe they exist, and in the chaos, Rodriguez’s star has risen. People are disoriented and worried, one fisherman tells me, and in times of uncertainty, they will follow the leaders who emerge. I hear arguments like Rodriguez’s from most fishermen I talk to. It feels, in a way, like the near completion of the species’ erasure — not just from the world, but from the kind of memory that comes from direct experience. Where some older fishermen remember catching vaquitas, there are so few now that younger fishermen may never see one at all. So who can show them that Rodriguez is wrong?

And who can blame some for falling in behind him? A powerful upstream nation has robbed their gulf of its river, with undeniable impacts on the environment, and yet everyone is chasing men who tool around in boats that aren’t much more than skiffs.

Meanwhile, the totoaba trade has gone on booming practically in plain sight, while those who want to play by the rules have had little recourse to earn a decent living directly from fishing. San Felipe residents hear the fiberglass hulls of pangas clapping across the waves at night. There are stories of poachers brandishing weapons on the water and in town. Fearing for their safety, the conservation fishermen postpone their work with the ghost net program, then postpone it again. Some people notice families with big new houses, nice new cars, while others have little. When it comes to who is involved, one former fisherman tells me, “It’s obvious.”

The special gear committee recently helped force progress on testing and permitting different kinds of alternative fishing equipment — including a promising sail-powered net that may supplant the trawl. And the permanent gill net ban and DiCaprio’s and Slim’s investments should add momentum. But until those and other efforts to address deeper problems gain real traction, many worry that illegal activity will only continue to escalate. The vaquita’s decline “is a symptom of a complex, sick system,” says Rafael Ortiz-Rodriguez of the Environmental Defense Fund of Mexico, who works with Upper Gulf communities to make the corvina fishery more sustainable. “Poverty, corruption, low governance, poor fisheries management, lack of education, lack of other alternative livelihoods. It’s like when you have the flu. If you just take some medication to stop your runny nose, it’s not going to cure you from the flu.”

Back at Rafael Sánchez Gastélum’s house, I ask just how much more money can be made by fishing for totoabas rather than fishing for legal species. Before he can respond, Alejandro cuts in sounding exasperated and tired. “Look,” he says, laying one corvina fillet on the table. “Normal.” He places another fillet a few inches from the first, and then drops another fillet on top of it, and another, and another, and another, and a handful, until there are more than a dozen. “Illegal,” he says.

On April 11, my last day in San Felipe, scientists from Rojas-Bracho’s lab and their collaborators decide to launch the ghost net program without the help of fishermen, who will join up again in May, when the totoaba season has subsided. Last year, 20 pangas plied the Upper Gulf; now, on the program’s first morning out, just four slowly drag grappling hooks through the sparkling sea. Last year, in a quiet moment of waiting with the engines off, those aboard one of the pangas saw two live vaquitas. Now, we see none.

But there are more nets, always the nets. And late in the day, there is a long, telltale slick of grease on the surface of the water, leading to a whitish blob worried by gulls. As we drift nearer, it resolves into a totoaba, well over a meter long. The creature is rotten, but not so rotten that we can’t see the slash where its swim bladder used to be. The six of us aboard the boat are silent as it bobs by in the swell, close enough to touch, like some portent of a grim future. Then it slips behind us, twisting in the wake before it is again swallowed by light and water, before it becomes nothing at all.

]]>No publisherOceanWildlifeFishColorado RiverActivismPeople & PlacesU.S. - Mexican BorderFeaturesMexico2017/09/23 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLessons in the moon’s shadowhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/essay-people-places-lessons-from-the-eclipse
How the eclipse makes you understand space, and why we should pay attention to lesser wonders.Most of us who came always knew there could be fog.

Oregon’s coast is a moody place, carved by surf, stormsurge and the Earth’s seismic shivers into sea-stacks and cliffs. Its tree-covered hills are alternately woven through with cloud, or scoured to sun by gusts that sculpt branches into bonsais and stiffen your fingers with chill. Sometimes, though, it is clear and still, as if the world is tasting light for the first time, made new again while you slept. As maybe it always is.

Those of us who came to see the total solar eclipse from the spot where the moon’s shadow would first touch the continent knew this. But we came anyway. We came from Portland. From Washington and Texas. From British Columbia and California and South Carolina. As if to bless our choice, the weekend was sunnier than any I’ve experienced on the coast. But sometime early in the morning on Monday, the day of the eclipse, a thick fog crept in. It obscured the houses across the Siletz River from where I camped in my truck, turned the toppled snags jutting from Siletz Bay into a blurred jumble of old bones.

The news had forecast an apocalypse of weekend traffic jams on the two-lane highways that serve the narrow strip of land between the Coast Range and sea. These never came. Emergency officials had prepared for another sudden inland surge of traffic from the coast Monday morning, in the event of bad weather. This didn’t happen either.

A few miles south of the Siletz, on Fishing Rock, a promontory just north of the centerline of the path of the moon’s shadow, knots of people set up folding chairs on beaten-down grass and orange dirt. Others slept in cliff-top alcoves overlooking the sea, or sheltered beneath blankets in their cars, waiting. The fog stubbornly stuck, some left, but still more came, with tripods, sweatshirts and children. We became wraiths together in the mist, and the sun finally joined, too—a matte coin of dimmed light. We could see the moon’s first breach of its circle with our bare eyes through that screen, though we tried not to look. We failed at this. We peered at it sideways in bursts. We fell silent, or exclaimed, or messed with our eclipse glasses, which proved useless.

Clusters of people wait for the eclipse on the Fishing Rock on the Oregon Coast.

Sarah Gilman

When the sun was a thin crescent, I drove north again to the Siletz, where someone told me the fog had broken. But in the unsettling midmorning twilight, the highway was an absence lined with dark trees, my truck the only set of headlights. I found just a dozen other cars parked along the shoulder near the river. I stepped out and stood with a trio of people—mother, daughter, friend. We looked southeast. The fog dimmed to an ominous yellow. The sun a dash, then nothing. In its absence, dark descended, and the world suspended – a breath held. Streetlights flicked on across the highway. Two Vs of honking geese flapped suddenly upriver from the direction of the sea, and vanished.

“Oh this is weird,” the daughter said, from her seat in the gravel.

It was an obvious enough observation, but also just the right word. Weird: a sort of vertigo that prickled the skin and made the dirt itself feel as though it had tilted. This Earth we stand on, that feeds us and slakes our thirst and can kill us too, the sun, the moon: We were suddenly confronted with their physical reality as objects that move in relation to each other in vast space.

We know this with our minds. But how often do we know it with our bodies? Put your hand on the ground. Can you feel the Earth’s curve? Hold your hand to the sun. Can you feel its weight? From the narrow perspective of our everyday lives, the ground is a surface that objects rest upon or move across, not an object itself. The sun is warmth and brightness in the sky. The moon is also this, though if you are the ocean or a woman, you feel its pull.

But I didn’t recognize the moon as a sphere of stone suspended above my head until its shadow fell across me. In that cold and sudden dark, I felt the space between it and me as true. I felt its mass and volume. And I shivered, because when the shadow of the moon flows over you like dark water, you feel yourself as object, too, and you feel your size. And this feeling, the speckness of your body in the universe’s palm, will make the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

Just like that, it was over. The tiny dash of the sun’s other edge appeared and the fog glowed rose. Then the crescent beamed through. Then the wan coin of the sun. I watched dazed as the highway surged with strings of headlights bound north, as all the cars along the shoulder peeled away within minutes. Nothing felt normal. Shadows seemed strangely distinct, and my head swam each time I closed my eyes, as if I stood at the edge of some bottomless drop. It made me wonder about all of us across the country who came to see, whatever the conditions. Who crowded in parks and on roads and in the woods and in the desert and in our backyards, all of us looking up with rapt, shared attention.

How would we come to understand our world if we learned to turn this attention on its everyday wonders? What would we save from our own ravenous appetites? If hordes of people pulled off the highway randomly to stare at an old growth Douglas fir, if they did it to watch the way a stream carves through a canyon, or even the way a swarm of flirting gnats become a galaxy when lit by a sunbeam?

Before I too turned inland for home, my friend Kathleen led me out onto Siletz Bay in a sea kayak. The fog had broken and we cut a line across the water towards one of the snags that had been a ghostly shape just hours before. Six large cormorants perched on its branches in perfect silhouette, their edges so sharp they looked like they had been snipped from the sky. I blinked, and they looked like 10 million years of history – the accumulation of tiny variations through generations, a dance between organism and organism, organism and environment. In the elegant curves of their necks and long backs and weird seabird feet was transcribed the shape and arc of time itself.

As we paddled closer, I expected them to spook and fly. I held my breath. They just stared back.

The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative (CFI) construction crew builds a sustainable route of steps through a talus field on Mount Columbia.

Eli Allan

What do you see when you look at a trail? Dirt and rocks? A line sketched across the landscape by 100,000 footsteps? The adventure of some not-yet-visible lake or summit or cirque?

Master Forest Service trail designer Loretta McEllhiney sees those things, too. But she also believes that a good trail is about controlling two unstoppable forces: People flowing up a mountain, and water flowing down.

And on a wintry May morning, I provide a perfect object lesson about one tool McEllhiney uses to steer these two juggernauts: I fall hard on a hillside and get snow down my pants.

“Sideslope,” McEllhiney says helpfully, after checking to make sure I’m OK. That’s why she’s picked this route for a new trail on the southern toe of Colorado’s Mount Elbert, where we’re bushwhacking over fallen aspens slick with fresh snow: The land here is steep enough that the path contouring across it will be the only place you can walk without tumbling ass-over-teakettle, and water will drain easily off its downhill edge, instead of scouring a trench down its center. “Sideslope,” McEllhiney concludes as I brush off my butt, “really helps confine people onto a bench.”

The official South Mount Elbert Trail that this route will replace, meanwhile, is a textbook example of what happens when walkers and water run amok. Colorado has 54 peaks over 14,000 feet high — its famous “Fourteeners” — and Mount Elbert is the tallest, rising to 14,433 feet from the bulky Sawatch Range just southwest of Leadville. People once drove to its summit in jeeps, and climbers eager to tag the state’s highest point followed the same straight-up route. Today, above treeline, the trail is a series of nasty-looking parallel trenches and denuded patches of tundra that McEllhiney calls a “catclaw” — 21 feet wide here, 13 there, knee-deep in places.

Over the next three years, professional trail crews and volunteers will close and revegetate 2 miles of this mess, and build more than 3 miles of new tread that McEllhiney and her seasonal assistant, Dana Young, have designed. They’ll use landscape elements like sideslope and structures like rock retaining walls to keep people on the right path and protect fragile alpine plants and thin topsoil. It’s one of 42 new “sustainable” routes on the Fourteeners that McEllhiney has conceived as the Forest Service’s Fourteener program manager.

Slim and muscular at 54, today she wears a green shell and a daypack strapped with a pair of snowshoes. A blonde braid pokes from under her beanie, and her face is like a map of past mirths, its lines pointing straight into the Colorado high country.

It would be hard to find anyone else who has spent so much time there. She has shepherded Fourteeners trailwork for more than two decades, through so many thousands of feet of elevation gain that she refuses to consider how many Everests they add up to. Through a pair of boots every season. Through two divorces.

“I’m not very good at marriages. I don’t know why I do it,” McEllhiney, now happily in the midst of her third, jokes when we drop our packs under the sheltering branches of a limber pine. “It’s like, do you love the mountains more than you love your husband?”

Loretta McEllhiney explains the key role pocket gophers play in soil distribution and seeding success for alpine plants before a trail crew begins construction on San Luis Peak.

Eli Allan

Colorado’s Fourteeners have been promoted as a group for their scenery and mountaineering opportunities since at least 1914. But it wasn’t until a wave of guide and coffee-table books were published in the 1970s that the moniker was cemented in the popular lexicon. Between the ’80s and ’90s, as the state’s urban Front Range ballooned, Fourteeners became a bona fide recreational craze and peak visits roughly doubled. By 2015, they were up to 260,000 each year, with hordes of hikers crossing into an ecosystem that is at once one of Earth’s toughest and most delicate.

McEllhiney was among those drawn to the mountains’ magnetism. She was studying nutrition and exercise physiology at Kansas State University when she saw a documentary about Gudy Gaskill and the Colorado Trail, which now stretches 567 miles across the Rockies from Durango to Denver. The first female president of the Colorado Mountain Club, Gaskill was a sinewy hiker and trailbuilder who shepherded the development of the renowned singletrack for three decades, through funding lapses and presidential administrations, even hosting and cooking food for trail crews. “I’m going to go hike that thing,” McEllhiney told herself, and in the summer of 1988, after her first husband settled in Leadville for college, she did. A year later, she put aside plans for a career in cardiac rehab and took a seasonal job with the local Forest Service, building and maintaining trail. One day, chopping through blown-down lodgepole, she turned to find Gaskill herself standing a short distance away. “Man,” Gaskill said. “I love to see a woman who can swing an ax.”

McEllhiney was hooked.

As she rose from trail grunt to wilderness ranger, she learned the Rockies as one comes to know her own skin. The cushion-shaped plants small as mixing bowls that might be a century old. The ground-nesting ptarmigan that phase from mottled gray to white when winter snows come. The alluring smell of alpine forget-me-nots that inspired her to plant the horticultural variety in her own lush backyard garden, even though they could never measure up.

The mountains also had a way of remembering human presence, and McEllhiney found arrowheads and flakes, a Finnish bread oven made of stones, a hollowed log full of porn magazines. Hiking trails there were no different, except that, instead of fading with time, some incised deeper with every footstep, every torrent of spring runoff and summer monsoon. It didn’t take long for McEllhiney and others to notice that the Fourteeners had a problem.

Only two had designed trails — Pikes Peak and Rocky Mountain National Park’s Longs Peak. All had routes created incidentally by hikers seeking the shortest path to the summit, usually straight uphill. Now, like the South Mount Elbert Trail, most were in bad shape, riddled with braids, chutes and bald spots. The damage wasn’t just to vegetation; in some places, it endangered hikers. On Mount Evans, not far west of Denver, one route had become a “hideous gully” up to 15 feet deep that served as a bowling alley for rocks dislodged by careless feet. The trails needed to be rerouted in some places to switchback more gradually across slopes, and hardened in others to withstand erosion.

The Forest Service already struggled to fund recreation projects; it would never be able to tackle the 49 Fourteeners on its lands without help. So a group of statewide outdoor nonprofits joined the agency in a formal partnership in 1994, which spun off into its own nonprofit in 1996. Called the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, it and other groups would supply professional and volunteer trail crews and most of the money for the needed work. It fell to McEllhiney — first as a ranger and then in her current post, which she took in 2001 — to coordinate those crews and help pioneer the trailwork needed to accomplish the group’s vision of creating a “sustainable” route for each peak.

McEllhiney doesn’t much like to talk about her first forays into trail design in the mid-’90s; one, on the north side of Elbert, is still a mess. But over time, her expertise grew. She hiked the old roads and rail lines that served Leadville’s 19th century mining boom, and peered at retaining walls and support structures that had weathered the decades, sometimes taking them apart and reassembling them to learn their dry masonry secrets. She got on a first-name basis with people who designed the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails, dropped in on trail designers on Mount St. Helens, built massive rock walls with a visiting Yosemite crew.

Today, thanks to McEllhiney’s designs and the labor of countless trail workers, there are 33 more tightly built routes on 32 Fourteeners, many doing what good trail should. A 1,272-foot-long rock staircase through a talus field diverts people away from sensitive Canada lynx habitat and alpine wetlands on the back side of Mount Massive. On Pyramid Peak, a 30-foot-wide, 6-foot-tall retaining wall that a crew built with a cable and pulley system channels people across a dissolving gully instead of up it.

Over the years, some people have questioned whether such extensive construction draws yet more hikers into the alpine, causing more damage. “There’s definitely concern that ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” McEllhiney says. “Well, we didn’t have to build it, and they were coming. I think that putting in a trail that can be maintained is really important. And it seems to be working.”

The ambitious project that McEllhiney designed will take another four years to complete. CFI volunteers Nick Gianoutsos and Staci Quevillon establish a robust sidewall on a trail leading up Quandary Peak.

Cameron Miller

Back on South Elbert, Dana Young blows on her hands. It’s still chilly, but the sun is out, and the falling flakes sparkle against the few blue patches of sky. Young, now 31, remembers well the first day she hiked into the high country with McEllhiney, when she started assisting with design four years ago. “I got altitude sickness,” she says. “In my head I’m thinking, ‘This woman is much older than I am, I should be able to keep up with her!’ That was my first mistake.”

The two women tinker with a GPS and clinometer — for measuring slope — as they get ready to plot a last-minute, 130-foot route adjustment around some late-season snowfields that could force hikers off the trail, causing exactly the kind of vegetation-stomping the project is meant to prevent. McEllhiney likes to say that the mountains talk to her. Now, she’s mostly quiet as she listens, taking readings, hammering orange plastic tassels into the duff to mark the center line and yellow ones to mark needed structures. Young follows after, entering GPS locations to guide this summer’s crews.

By late June, when the higher snows withdraw, McEllhiney and Young will venture into the alpine, hauling packs heavy with camping supplies, wooden stakes, tassels and metal staples. They’ll rise between 3 and 5 a.m., work 10 hours or more when they can. They never know when a thunderstorm will cut a day short and chase them below treeline.

McEllhiney has extra reason to be cautious. On Mount Belford, ground current from a nearby lightning strike knocked her down and blew off the soles of her boots. Even so, she stayed on the mountain for a week until her boss forced her to go to the hospital. Another time, in 2009, McEllhiney watched in horror near the summit of Mount Massive as a military helicopter lost its tail rotor to the wind and disintegrated against a ridgeline. There are funny stories, too: The map that she and a past assistant traded with some hikers for a flask of peach brandy; the time she accidentally stepped in a pile of human shit in her Chaco sandals, then had to steal them back from a strap-gnawing marmot who had spirited them into a rockpile.

The work, though, will likely continue long after McEllhiney’s own story diverges from the Fourteeners’. After all, mountains are mountains, and even the best-built trail is sometimes no match for hard use, erosive soils, and the inexorable pull of gravity. In 1999, the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative envisioned completing the highest-priority trail fixes within six years, spending a season or less on each of 35 mountains. Eighteen years later, most peaks have taken two seasons or more, and several have yet to be tackled. While many rebuilt trails have endured, others are already falling apart. Fixing those and constructing 16 new sustainable routes will cost at least $24 million, mostly supplied by partners. With so much left to do, says Lloyd Athearn, the group’s executive director, “We all fear the day when Loretta might retire.”

Fortunately, there’s little sign that will happen soon. On our way back to the truck, McEllhiney leads us along the old South Mount Elbert Trail. We struggle to match her pace on its steep grade as she tells us how, when the new trail is complete, crews will come to this one and remove the sign that marks it. They will shift soil into its furrowed tread, lace it with native seed, transplant young trees every 10 feet, cover it with protective mats.

We pause to catch our breath at a graffiti-carved aspen. “I’ve been working on this trail since I began trail crew,” McEllhiney observes after a moment. Someday, with luck, all trace of it will be gone, and this scarred tree will be marooned in a forest that has closed around it. “Smoked on Elbert,” it will proclaim to an indifferent thatch of spring grass and flowers, shivered with leaf shadow. McEllhiney turns and smiles at me, then strides up the trail.

Sarah Gilman is an HCN contributing editor and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Before becoming a journalist in 2006, she worked as a Colorado Fourteeners Initiative trail crew supervisor on Mount Massive, near Leadville, Colorado. Follow @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherPeople & PlacesColoradoU.S. Forest ServiceOutdoor Rec Special IssueRecreationMountain WestCommunitiesDepartment of InteriorGrowth & SustainabilityPublic LandsScientific ResearchTechnologyTravelWildernessNot on homepage2017/06/26 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAt home with the ‘unsettlers’https://www.hcn.org/issues/49.6/at-home-with-the-unsettlers
A new book features characters who have gone far beyond what most of us consider ‘good enough.’For Mark Sundeen, the search began with a guilty meat snack.

After two decades of bumming around the country — first as a dirtbag outdoorsman stringing together jobs in the rural West and later as a city-bound freelancer and “money-lung … whose sole purpose was to inhale dollars, transform them into pleasure, then exhale a stream of carbon into the air, feces into the sewer, and plastic containers into the landfill” — Sundeen settled in Missoula, Montana, seeking a simpler existence. He got engaged to a woman who valued the same, bike-commuted 14 miles daily, lived on garden feasts that took hours to concoct and left the sink cluttered with wholesome dirt clods.

“Unsettler” Luci Breiger rides her bike home from the fields after a day of planting onions. She and husband Steve Elliott own Lifeline Farm Produce in Victor, Montana.

Rab Cummings

In a world where human appetites obliterate entire ecosystems, Sundeen recognized that what we choose to consume has moral implications. But one night while grocery shopping, faced with the $6.50 price tag on organic butter, he broke and headed instead for the much cheaper stuff in the conventional food aisles. There, he succumbed to a greasy breast of fried chicken, no doubt factory-raised on monoculture grain and cruelly caged with a throng of its brethren. Then, he wiped his sins away with a moist towelette and pedaled home.

It’s a wry encapsulation of a conundrum that those who aspire to sustainability face: We carve out sacrifices here and there — Drive less! Recycle! Install solar! — until they interfere with other desires. In search of a clearer path, Sundeen, author of The Man Who Quit Money, sets out to find people who have gone far beyond what most of us consider “good enough.”

The result is The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America — a gorgeous new book that provides a contemporary twist on Wendell Berry’s 1977 classic, The Unsettling of America. Where Berry argues that industrial agribusiness and modern capitalism have distanced people from the land and each other, with catastrophic consequences for the environment and communities, Sundeen explores a movement toward radical simplicity meant to solve those ills, digging deep into peculiarly American strains of utopianism and telling the stories of three couples trying to live out their ideals in wildly different places.

Olivia Hubert, a black horticulturalist, and Greg Willerer, a white former teacher with roots in the anarchist punk scene, create a tiny urban farm, hoping to localize and humanize Detroit’s inner-city food system — part of a bigger ambition to build a more just version of a city bludgeoned by industrial collapse, racism and poverty. There is Ethan Hughes, who led a cross-country, bike-driven “superhero” expedition to do good, and his wife, Sarah Wilcox, a classically trained soprano, who created a car-free, electricity-free intentional community in Missouri that engages in nonviolent activism. Finally, we meet Luci Brieger and Steve Elliott, who founded a successful small organic farm not far from Missoula, and catalyzed a vibrant local food scene across western Montana.

The book is part memoir — chronicling Sundeen’s own new marriage and quest for a better life — part interwoven biography, and part social history. But though Sundeen finds beauty in each of the couples’ lives, he doesn’t flatten them into human Instagrams: “the soft-focus shots of sun-dappled mason jars and fresh-picked pears” that tug at the hearts of the rest of us cubicle-bound hordes. Hubert and Willerer must run off armed intruders from the crackhouse across the street instead of merely grappling with gophers as other farmers do. Hughes and Wilcox weary of the infighting so common in intentional communities and grope to maintain momentum when few of their peers are willing to commit to the enterprise for more than a summer. And Brieger and Elliott watch their dream enter mainstream society as yet another piece of the corporate machine: Mega-organic agriculture that plants sprawling monocultures and sends plastic-sealed produce thousands of miles, driving right over the environmental and community benefits of the small, diversified farms that the couple built their own lives around.

The characters are weird, stubborn and strong, and Sundeen provides a nuanced picture of their beliefs, underpinned by both religious and social justice movements and influences ranging from Berry and Thomas Jefferson to the Quakers, Booker T. Washington, the Nation of Islam, Tolstoy and Gandhi. Importantly, Sundeen also acknowledges that the “renunciation of privilege” can become “just another means of exercising it.”

In the end, nobody finds revelatory answers, and yet all persist despite obstacles. And Sundeen himself recognizes that his own role is not to be a pioneer of simple living, but to be what he already is: A writer. In this, the book seems to suggest that the true recipe for revolution is not utopianism per se, but the emotional foundations from which its practioners strive. In other words, to live right, one must find true purpose, work hard in its service and do the best good she can.

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s AmericaMark Sundeen324 pages, hardcover: $26.Riverhead Books, 2017.]]>No publisherBooks2017/04/03 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGo North, young womanhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/49.4/go-north-young-woman
In a place no one can see you, you can see yourself more clearly. … Trust the road in your name. Ride Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.

— Angel Nafis, from the poem “Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country.”

Think of your skin as a map.

Its marks inscribe a story of your life. The raggedness of your fingertips from biting your nails. The lines in your cheeks from laughing. The scar from surgery to help knit broken bone. The burn you gave yourself when only pain would calm you. The nick on your wrist that, whenever you touch it, makes you think of the talus field where you stumbled and cut yourself, the mountain lake where you washed the blood away.

On this August afternoon, the skin on my calves is tanned dark, crisscrossed with scratches, welted with bugbites, scummed over with beaver pond. On this August afternoon, my skin says that I’ve ventured into the boreal forest, and that it’s kicking my ass.

I’m a few days into a 16-day canoe trip with five girlfriends down the remote Spatsizi and Upper Stikine rivers — joined threads in the high reaches of a great system of braided, salmon-bearing waterways that originate in a swath of northern British Columbia known as the Sacred Headwaters. It’s a place toothy with mountain ranges, broad-shouldered with tundra plateaus, and furred with endless forests of white and black spruce and bursts of poplar just turning gold.

Roads are sparse here, so travel is by floatplane, boat, horse, and, for those who don’t mind shredding their flesh in thickets of grasping branches, by foot. Which is why we’ve generally stuck with the canoes until now. But Krista Langlois and Kate Greenberg, our navigators, had consulted the topos and sparse guidebook entries and identified the far end of Cold Fish Lake, which appeared to be about a dozen miles off the Spatsizi, as a good base to backpack into the high alpine for tarns and tundra. So we hauled out our trusty boats and struck up a winding tributary called Mink Creek, where we would supposedly, eventually, find a trail.

During the bushwhack up to Cold Fish Lake, amphibious footwear was necessary for the many stream, beaver pond and muddy suckhole crossings.

Krista Langlois

Three hours later, we’ve puzzled through thatches of fallen logs and climbed in and out of the creek channel dozens of times, but have traveled only a mile. Even when we find the first triangular trail-blaze nailed to a tree and begin hoofing up a faint single track through yet more tangled forest, Cold Fish hovers, mirage-like, beyond reach. At 8 p.m., Krista and I drop our packs and jog ahead through deepening blue shadows until we can finally get a clear view of the lake’s placid waters. They’re another decidedly unplacid mile away, through a thickly vegetated bog. “Fuck this,” we say in unison, and trot back to the group to throw down camp by a mosquito-ridden stream.

By 3 p.m. the next day, we’re battered, smelly, smiling and back at the Spatsizi. “Mothah Rivah!” someone exclaims, as we shed clothes and plunge into the water. “Hey, check this out,” Krista yells, bending over some fireweed, then ambushes Kate Lauth with a fistful of mud. Muck flies. Anna Santo paints a smiley face on her belly. Jen Crozier washes earth from Kate Greenberg’s hair.

My scratches sting as I rinse the silt away, but I feel more comfortable in my skin than I have in ages. There is no one here to see us, no one but ourselves to judge what we should do or what we are capable of doing. In a world that expects women to look and act in certain ways, we’ve staked out territory where we can move without thought for our bodies as anything other than our native homes. We are making and remaking our maps, letting this place write itself on our arms and legs — sketching where we’ve been, and where we might go, should we follow these routes emerging below our feet, under our paddles, across our flesh. And after dinner, Anna slides into a sassy red dress from the costume bag, grabs a fly rod, and wades across the Mink to find a good spot to cast.

Anna Santo and Kate Lauth steer their canoe toward Red Goat Mountain on a calm stretch of the Spatsizi River.

Krista Langlois

The seeds of our excursion were planted in northern Minnesota, a place made as much of lake as of land. The Kates once attended a summer camp there that culminated in a 45-day wilderness canoe trip and decided they wanted to carry that tradition into their adult lives. In the summer of 2015, they reached out to like-minded women they’d met in college, through work, in Colorado mountain towns.

Krista had guided troubled teenagers on backcountry excursions in Alaska. Jen and Kate L. had done the same in the Southern Rockies. I’d spent a few summers building trails and studying birds in the high alpine. Kate G. had worked on restoring the Colorado River Delta across the border in Mexico, and Anna had researched beavers in Patagonia. All of us, now in our late 20s to mid-30s, loved the idea of building a community of outdoorswomen that we could keep coming back to as we moved on into careers in writing, medicine, therapy and advocacy.

We weren’t aiming to make first descents of whitewater canyons. We just wanted to be far out in the world together for the longest stretches we could muster. I imagined us still at it in 30 years — silver-edged women in the mold of Mardy Murie, a naturalist who raised her family in the wilds of Wyoming and Alaska and helped lead the charge to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

We gave ourselves a name, Wild Streak, and met by Skype on autumn evenings, researching the Northern rivers we might float — the Noatak or Kluane, the Gataga and Kechika. We chose the Upper Stikine and its tributary Spatsizi for their on- and off-water opportunities and the fact that they fit our budget of $2,000 per person. We scoured trip reports, ordered maps, marked out possible camps. Doing it just for ourselves didn’t seem like enough, so we used the trip to raise money for nonprofits that give teen girls opportunities like the ones that helped us become confident in the wilderness — ultimately bankrolling several scholarships for canoe and glacier trips.

Finally, late last July, we rendezvoused in Bellingham, Washington, stuffed a minivan and sedan with gear, and blew across the U.S. border and 1,000 miles of British Columbia to the tiny backwater of Iskut. There, on the shore of Eddontenajon Lake, we piled into a floatplane. The unexpectedly handsome pilot, Dan Brown, flashed us a dimpled grin, then lifted us with Canadian nonchalance into the sky.

Mountain ranges, then more mountain ranges, and then the Spatsizi uncoiled below us like a rope thrown across the valley floor. Aprons of rust-colored scree descended from high ridges to oxbows that looped around pocket lakes. Our landing on one of them was so smooth that I barely registered touching down until I saw spray jetting past my window. Standing on the gravel beach next to a fresh pile of bear scat, we watched the floatplane rise again, drag its reflection into the trees, vanish. We were alone in the middle of nowhere, alone in the middle of everywhere. Then, we were in the water, swimming our first loaded canoe to the portage that would put us on the 135-mile stretch of river we’d waited so long to paddle. That night, as I climbed into my tent on our first beach camp, mayflies glittered in my headlamp beam like animate stars. They reminded me of the constellation of bruises on my shins. They pointed the way.

Loading canoes onto a floatplane on Eddontenajon Lake in northern British Columbia, during a 16-day all-women canoe trip.

Krista Langlois

The trip spools out as languidly as the river. We wake when we want, build morning campfires, stop when the impulse to explore strikes. Sometimes we float more than a dozen miles a day, sometimes none. We fish for Arctic grayling and Dolly Varden trout that, cooked in the coals, taste of snowmelt and salt. Not everyone has canoed whitewater before, so on the calmer Spatsizi, Kate L. and Krista help us brush up on paddling strokes and practice swinging in and out of currents and eddies. Later, we mock up a pulley-assisted rope arrangement, called a Z-drag, on a sapling. This would help us pull a canoe off a mid-river rock should a mishap occur in one of the mellow but respectable rapids.

The boats become as beloved — and irritating — as family members, and we name them accordingly. There’s the Sphincter, for the puckered passenger openings in its ill-fitting brown canvas spray deck — a snap-on cover meant to keep the canoe from swamping. There’s the Pussy Rabbit, for the Russian feminist punk band and the pipe-smoking bunny emblazoned on the canoe’s red sides. And there’s the sleek green 17-footer that we vie for each day. That one we call Dan Brown.

Kate L. becomes my frequent paddling partner, talking me through maneuvers around submerged logs and whale-backed boulders, then pumping her fist with me in triumph as I gain confidence steering Dan Brown from the stern. In the wide valley where the Spats pours into the broader, faster Stikine, we float over the hard line where the water shifts from opaque beige to a turquoise so clear I can see river-bottom stones six feet below, our shadow slipping over them as if we’re still flying.

An old fire scar marks the shore with miles of skeletonized trunks, like a splatter of gray paint across the dark landscape. When it rains, which is often, the drops bead brightly across the Stikine’s surface before melting into its flow. We stay warm in skintight wetsuits and dub ourselves the Future Dolphin Trainers of America. In one spot, sheared-off earthen banks rise 20 feet above our heads where a landslide blocked the river earlier in the summer. The Stikine still tears insistently at the remains, dragging whole spruce trees free and pulling them along in the current beside our canoes. A thunderstorm boils up over the confluence with the Pitman River as we’re eating dinner one evening. The towering clouds catch the last sun, send down a spark of rainbow, set the forest burning anew with light. We stand watching, ankle-deep in mud with our arms around each other, our faces gold, our gnocchi forgotten.

Save for a man we glimpse a week into the trip, tending a remote riverside lodge, we meet nobody. Little wonder, then, that the landscape feels secretive. We encounter few animals, but each sandbar is brailled with tracks: Bears, both grizzly and black, wolves with paws larger than my palms, bobcat, lynx, moose, beaver, porcupine. We find skulls and antlers pressed into the spongy forest floor. Odd splashes ring from the river some nights, and groans and crashes haunt the bushes. Even one of the three moose that we actually see seems insubstantial as a ghost. The young bull clacks his teeth and rolls his eyes, splashing down the center of the channel, and then, when Krista and I turn for a moment to navigate a riffle, vanishes without sound or trace.

Anna Santo, Jen Crozier and Kate Lauth use a map and GPS to try to ascertain the group’s location on the Spatsizi River.

Krista Langlois

There are other mysteries, too. Along one bar, the river’s high-water flows have left not-quite-cairns of clustered stones. Delicate, almost deliberate, arrangements of bone-white driftwood decorate high-water lines and former eddies. It’s as if the country murmurs just beyond the edge of hearing, moves just beyond the edge of vision, watches us as even we watch it slip past.

But if the country keeps itself close, it steadily reveals us to one another. We make decisions by consensus, move fluidly together on the water, support each other taking risks, or choosing not to.

On our last day, we come upon a significant rapid, one we’d failed to note on the map. Anna — one of our boldest members, and one of the least experienced on whitewater — decides she wants to test her new steering skills. We eddy out so she can replace Kate G. in the stern of the Sphincter, and all of us rock-hop down the shore to scout routes through midstream boulders that churn the Stikine into a froth. Then, we slide back under our spray decks and push off, one by one, into the current.

Krista and Jen take the lead without incident, then Kate G. and Anna, who punches through a big hole, scoops in a fair amount of river, but does just fine. In the rear, Kate L. steers the Pussy Rabbit beautifully from the stern, while I paddle hard in the bow. Exposed rocks and pourovers slip by, waves splash across my arms and fill my lap. When the rapid spits us out into the slackwater of the tight canyon below, we lift our paddles to the cloudy sky and cheer.

Later, long after we’ve repacked our gear and driven hundreds of miles south, we stop at a busy lakeside campground. I cook dinner for the crew in silence, then break away to sit at the water’s edge alone, feeling scraped out by the end of the journey, the sudden plunge into a frenetic world of strangers, cellphone service, social media. Two loons paddle nearby, singing long and low from the reeds. And then the full moon surprises me with its sudden appearance. Its first fingers of light fold over the ridges to the east, slowly hoist its glare into the sky, reach for my hands. I see my cracked knuckles, the thick new calluses on my palms. Look where you’ve been, I whisper to no one. Imagine where you’ll go. I wipe my eyes with the back of my wrist and head back to my friends.

Sarah Gilman is an HCN contributing editor and writer based in Portland Oregon. Her work will be anthologized in The Best Women's Travel Writing, in May.Follow @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherRecreationCanadaPeople & PlacesRivers & LakesTravelTravel IssueWilderness2017/03/06 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBLM moves away from landmark Northwest Forest Plan https://www.hcn.org/issues/48.12/blm-moves-away-from-landmark-northwest-forest-plan
Court showdown may force the agency to reconsider its Pacific Northwest logging goals.Crunching across a brushy, logged-over slope near Corvallis, Oregon, Reed Wilson points his trekking pole at an ancient Douglas fir in a neighboring patch of forest. The tree is more than an armspan in diameter, its toes decorated with saprophytic orchids and millipedes.

One of 117 behemoths among these otherwise young stands, this tree and 38 others also wear necklaces of pink tape. Tree-climbing citizen surveyors left them to mark the presence of red tree vole nests, explains Wilson, a gray-haired local jeweler and activist. The tiny rodents devour conifer needles and use the hair-like resin ducts to build pillowy abodes in the trees’ branches. Most vole business takes place high in the canopy — interlaced limbs offering access to other trees, food, mates and new homes. The vole is also favored prey for the threatened northern spotted owl, and its population here in the low-slung northern Coast Range is a candidate for endangered species protection.

The federal government set aside this area as part of a 10-million-acre network of reserves in western Oregon, Washington and Northern California, largely to protect species like spotted owls and voles whose old-growth habitat was being destroyed by logging. In 2009, though, the Bureau of Land Management proposed a commercial project to thin younger trees here, ostensibly to restore more diverse forest structure. And though the Benton Forest Coalition, to which Wilson belongs, and two other environmental groups forced the agency to leave intact forest around most of the vole trees, several stand alone amid logging slash, their tiny tenants marooned and more vulnerable to predation. “This was native forest,” regenerating from a 1931 wildfire, Wilson says. “It hadn’t been logged before.”

Now, the BLM is proposing a pair of new management plans for its 2.5 million acres in western Oregon. Several environmental groups fear the plans could make it even easier to allow destructive logging inside old-growth reserves.

They also signal the agency’s departure from the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which created the reserves in the first place to help end a bitter struggle over Northwestern forests. The landmark agreement allowed some logging while emphasizing ecosystem preservation on 24.5 million acres of federal land, 80 percent of it overseen by the Forest Service and most of the rest divided between the BLM and National Park Service. Part of the agreement’s strength was that it unified forest management across an entire landscape, regardless of agency boundaries, says David Moryc, senior director of river protection at American Rivers. “If we’re calving off a big section and looking at it differently, that will by its nature have major ramifications for the health of the ecosystem.” Worse, says veteran Oregon forest advocate Andy Kerr, it seems like a bad omen for the Forest Service’s approaching updates to its own portion of the Northwest Forest Plan.

A male red tree vole in a Douglas fir. The species is one of many that received special protection under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, due to its reliance on the Pacific Northwest’s dwindling old-growth forests.

Michael Durham

The BLM’s revisions have roots in the 1937 federal Oregon and California Lands Act, which covers most of the agency’s heavily checkerboarded western Oregon lands. The “O&C Act” aimed to halt the turn-of-the century timber industry’s cut-and-run approach, denuding lands and then abandoning communities. It mandates that the BLM manage forests to provide a “sustained yield” of timber — never cutting more than can grow back annually, but also ensuring a steady supply in perpetuity. The federal government was also supposed to pass 50 percent of net logging revenues to 18 western Oregon counties to help make up for the lack of tax revenue from those O&C lands, though this function has since been covered and augmented by a safety net law called the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act.

The Northwest Forest Plan was expected to supply 1.1 billion board-feet from national forest and BLM land annually, including through clear-cutting old growth outside reserves. But logging fluctuated with congressional appropriations, economic factors and environmental lawsuits, and the cut was lower than anticipated.

Amid the scuffling, both the BLM and Forest Service shifted to timber programs that emphasized thinning younger forests, including those recovering from clear-cuts. This approach is less controversial than clear-cutting, but the BLM supply will run out in less than 10 years, says Mark Brown, project manager on the agency’s plans. The BLM also faces new federal spotted owl protections, including critical habitat designated in 2012. “The balance we’re trying to strike is fulfilling our responsibilities under the O&C Act, while also meeting our responsibilities under laws like the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act,” Brown says. “When we fulfill all of those, we don’t have a lot of decision space.”

The proposed plans would increase the timber harvest more than a third over present levels, to 278 million board-feet, by returning to more aggressive logging on a smaller portion of forest. Simultaneously, they boost the amount of land protected in reserves from 66 percent to 75 percent, pulling in most (though not all) of the remaining mature and old-growth forests technically left unprotected by the Northwest Forest Plan. The plans would also end salvage logging of burned trees inside reserves — a provision environmentalists have long fought for.

Logging truck driver James Griffin tightens the chains securing a full load of logs he’s taking to a mill from a burned area in Washington. Environmentalists oppose salvage logging of burned forests because it can damage habitat, slow natural recovery and increase erosion.

Alan Berner/ The Seattle Times

Still, a coalition of 22 environmental groups has filed a formal protest, arguing that the plans would eliminate key protections. For one, they shrink stream buffers that have significantly improved watersheds by, among other things, limiting logging that contributes to sediment runoff. The buffers also gave streams room to shift course, and maintained connections between habitat patches for species like spotted owls. Inside old-growth reserves, the new plans would drop prohibitions against cutting trees over 80 years old, and allow logged openings up to four acres — eight times the size currently allowed. And though managers are expressly directed to maintain habitat for threatened spotted owls and murrelets, another imperiled bird, they’re permitted to remove or downgrade it, through fuel reduction or other treatments, for “the overall health of the stand or adjacent stands.” Such vague language invites abuse, says Chandra LeGue, western Oregon field coordinator for Oregon Wild. “It’s more discretionary. And if the policy says they can do it, we’re afraid they will do it.”

In sum, though, the plans are an incremental but “clear improvement” over the Northwest Forest Plan, says Paul Henson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Oregon state supervisor. The agency favors active restoration if it ultimately improves habitat, Henson says, and the BLM explicitly adopted concepts from Fish and Wildlife’s spotted owl recovery plan, which makes it easier to hold managers accountable for protecting the species. Plus, the BLM must consult with Fish and Wildlife on projects that could harm owls or murrelets — an additional safeguard.

But environmentalists’ strong objections raise doubts about whether the BLM can achieve its new timber targets. The Pacific Northwest may be at a point where logging is socially unacceptable unless it has clear ecological purposes that outweigh economic ones, observes Norm Johnson, a forestry professor at Oregon State University and a Northwest Forest Plan author. In the BLM’s “moderate intensity” logging areas, companies could cut 85 to 95 percent of trees, which seems likely to incite controversy even in cases where it’s ecologically defensible. “If your harvest can be identified with clear-cutting, you’re sunk. The public hates clear-cutting on federal land,” Johnson says. The BLM is “really testing the ground for changes to the Northwest Forest Plan. And if the BLM can’t do it, it says a lot about the future of federal forestry.”

Local counties worry about harvests for different reasons. “It’s not an attainable goal,” says Tony Hyde, a Columbia County commissioner and chairman of the Association of O&C Counties, which has also protested the new plans. Chris Cadwell, a retired BLM forest analyst consulting for the counties, says a fair amount of spotted owl and murrelet critical habitat still falls outside reserves, in harvest lands. That may mean further restrictions from Fish and Wildlife or environmental lawsuits. The plan also forbids projects that would harm spotted owls, for up to eight years or until Fish and Wildlife begins management of barred owls, an invasive species that threatens spotted owls. That, Cadwell warns, could cause further logging reductions.

The timing is terrible for the counties. Last year, Congress failed to renew Secure Rural School payments, and direct O&C payments will be much lower, given timber revenues’ slump. Four O&C counties are on a state watch list for financial distress. They have some of the state’s lowest property taxes, but have been unable to raise rates to make up for shortfalls. Already, 17 O&C counties plan to sue. The O&C Act, they argue, requires the BLM to offer at least 500 million board-feet annually, with all O&C timberlands available for “permanent forest production.”

The lawsuit and others to come may force a court reckoning over just how much timber harvest the 1937 law requires. “I think the counties want to know and the forest products industry wants to know and the environmental community wants to know: What does the O&C Act really mean?” says Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a Northwest timber trade association. “Does it mean what it says? Or has it been circumvented by other acts of Congress?”

Environmentalists feel confident in their legal interpretation: After all, the O&C Act mandates protecting watersheds and recreation alongside timber production. “We read the O&C Act as Congress’s first attempt to do a multiple-use statute,” says Kerr. The BLM, he and others believe, has discretion to prioritize more conservation. And if the plans stand, Kerr says, “I’m looking forward to them trying to cut old growth and having people sit in trees again.”

Reed Wilson might be up for that. Originally from Texas, he got involved in public-lands activism through a famous tree-sit to save 94 acres of old growth at central Oregon’s Fall Creek. “It lasted five years, through the winter and everything,” he says. “It was wonderful.” Up on the platforms, flying squirrels would sometimes land on protesters. “They’d try to take the food out of your hand,” Wilson says. “We’d see them launch. They’d go to the edge of the platform and just, choooooo.”

]]>No publisherForestsEndangered SpeciesGrowth & SustainabilityNorthwestPublic LandsWildlifeBureau of Land Management2016/07/25 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMeet the group that’s turning artists into nature’s advocateshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.11/how-an-oregon-group-is-turning-artists-into-natures-advocates
In the backcountry, an experiment in using art to elevate environmental issues.Hard rain has driven the small crew down from their camp at an alpine lake to a roadside national forest picnic area. The spot’s pleasant, even under a late-May storm: Oregon’s Clackamas and Collawash rivers meet here, and conifers and the fluorescent whorls of horsetails overhang the clear green water. Amy Harwood — all in black with an Army-drab beanie and a long braid over one shoulder — crouches by a metal fire pit, knifing kindling from a wedge of wood. Four others, all artists, stand around her. Despite sweaters and jackets, everyone looks chilled.

“Are there rippling muscles in there yet?” asks Harwood’s partner, Ryan Pierce, pointing at my notebook. The flames falter in the wet ash. Harwood blows them back to life as Pierce narrates my hypothetical story: “ ‘It seemed like fire sprouted from their fingers … or from their rippling muscles,’ ” he says gravely. “ ‘Julie made a bird call and we were suddenly surrounded by finches.’ “

It makes for an unusual staff meeting, but then this is an unusual group. Signal Fire, which Pierce and Harwood co-founded, runs public-lands-based backcountry trips and residencies for artists and art students. And Julie Perini, Wendy Given and Kerri Rosenstein are alums and volunteer guides.

The couple seeks to address gaps in their respective fields: Harwood, a longtime staffer at Bark, a Portland-based environmental nonprofit, and a former staffer for the Center for Biological Diversity, feels that conservation groups lack the right tools to foster broad cultural change. And Pierce is frustrated by the urban art world’s detachment from the wild places he loves.

Signal Fire, they hope, will infuse the environmental movement with new energy and inspire artists to defend public lands. “I think the population we’re dealing with has a special power. No matter how loud I yell, no matter how good my mass email is, I can’t amplify the way they can,” says Harwood. “Making a painting or producing a play or making a record — it’s hard to claim that it’s going to change people. But we know that it does.”

Dollar Lake 2011, created from charcoal ink from burnt trees, maps out a fire footprint for the project Burn Perimeters (Fire Maps).

Gary Wiseman

Harwood came to Portland, Oregon, for the ocean but stayed for the forest. When she arrived for college from Portland, Maine, in 1998, she didn’t know Oregon’s largest city was inland. Backpacking wasn’t her bag; she grew up sailing and island-hopping. Still, something clicked after an activist invited her to a tree-sit to stop a timber sale. “I really loved the logistics of it,” she says. “There were a lot of Friday nights where I was skiing supplies in. It felt like what I was supposed to do.”

In 2008, Harwood won a prize from the local weekly for her environmental advocacy. Pierce, who had just finished his MFA, had long talked about creating a field program for artists: He discovered the self-reliance necessary for becoming one on a semester-long college backpacking course in the Southwest. “Amy was probably like, ‘Let’s actually start this,’” Pierce recalls. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know how to start a thing.’ ”

So the pair used Harwood’s prize money to buy a ’63 Suburban and remodel a trailer. They towed it up a logging road and left artists for weeklong independent stays on Mount Hood. Then, Signal Fire morphed into backcountry stints with groups of artists in a wall tent. But the first backpacking trips to Oregon wilderness areas in the Wallowa Mountains and along Opal Creek in 2010 and 2011 were what cemented the identity of the organization, which became a full-fledged nonprofit in 2013. “It was just watching people respond to the interruption of their life that way,” Harwood says. “A bunch had never backpacked, and the physical challenge of it really pushed their creativity.”

The artists aren’t required to create anything, though many do: Nude self portraits, an elephant snare, glamour shots of rotting stumps, movies of tap dancing in rock outcroppings. Some find the experience transformative. Grace Chen, then a California College of the Arts student from Singapore, landed a spot on Signal Fire’s first “Wide Open Studios” in 2013, exploring various California wildlands on a five week accredited course. “I had no idea that there was so much space in the world that human beings didn’t live on,” she recalls. Fascinated by the puzzle-piece patterns of ponderosa bark, she made rubbings that she developed into a series of calligraphy-like characters. The trip galvanized her activism, inspiring her to tackle poverty, race and food systems. “Understanding the historical and political context that shaped these landscapes I was living among, I realized that the status quo doesn’t have to be this way,” she says. “It’s this way because of peoples’ choices, and we can make different choices.”

Against Forgetting, made from a wax rubbing of tree rings and a fingerprint.

Nina Montenegro

These days, Signal Fire runs seven to 10 trips per year, mostly in the West, ranging from a couple hundred dollars to $3,500 for the college course. So far, more than 300 people have participated. Pierce and Harwood share the directorship part-time with Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, a Klamath Modoc visual artist. Each season is arranged around a theme — “the triumphant yet troubled” history of wilderness, for example — and features readings and speakers from environmental and social justice groups designed to help participants think critically about where they are. This year’s theme is “Unwalking the West,” with excursions roughly tracing — in reverse — the routes of explorers like Lewis and Clark. Participants will talk about Indigenous sovereignty and the dark, fraught backstory of the public lands.

“It’s a slow process, trying to bring things like that into Signal Fire,” says Farrell-Smith, who will co-lead a trip to the Klamath region on the Oregon-California border. There, they’ll meet with Indigenous artist Natalie Ball and discuss the loss of the Klamath Tribes’ reservation. “It’s one thing to talk about Native issues and autonomy within a group of other Native people,” Farrell-Smith says. “But it’s vital for everyone in this country to know whose land they’re on and to pay respect to those people and those ancestors.”-

-Recruiting diverse artists has been the organization’s greatest challenge. After last year’s participants ended up being mostly- white, Signal Fire redoubled outreach efforts through -community and cultural centers, groups focused on getting people of color outside, activist networks, and public -universities. It worked: This season, over half the participants were eligible for six scholarships reserved for non-whites.

It’s difficult to tell how much the experience influences artists’ actual work, since many already deal with environmental themes. But several say that joining an artistic community with similar interests is reaffirming. And the outdoor experience can open new doors. For Portland-based Kurtis Hough, it inspired backpacking trips to Utah and Arizona that helped him complete a trilogy of abstract geological films involving death, rebirth, and long-term environmental change. It also fosters collaborations: After meeting artist Nina Montenegro, Hough deployed his drone camera to help document part of her “Against Forgetting” project: Circles of sawdust representing the circumference of old-growth trees, poured in places where they might have stood. One was in a Portland Superfund site, another in a bricked-over public park.

The group is intentionally not hardcore, like the National Outdoor Leadership School. Once, in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, NOLS students stumbled haggard and hungry into a Signal Fire camp, Harwood says. “We backpacked in just as far as they did. But we were sitting around, talking about critical art theory and eating chocolate. And we were like, ‘Do you want some chocolate?’ And they were like, ‘Really?’ All wild-eyed.”

Instead, Signal Fire’s message is empowerment through accessibility — underscoring the idea that these lands are available to everyone. “One thing I love about Signal Fire is that it takes (people) like me who don’t go alone into the wild, and they handhold you, get you introduced to it and used to it,” says Portland-based artist Vanessa Renwick, a repeat alum who also serves on the board. “You learn to bear-hang your food and shovel your shit. You get more than your toes wet. You get your ass wet out there.”

Last year, Signal Fire started the Tinderbox Residency, which places an artist with a grassroots environmental group. Gary Wiseman embedded with Bark in the first, and soon found himself deeply engaged in efforts to change public attitudes about forest fires. He followed Forest Watch coordinator Michael Krochta to burns and collected charcoal from trees, then laboriously transformed it into ink and painted Rorschach-esque renderings of each fire’s footprint. He now teaches classes on wild-crafting the ink, because “the process is a tool to help people understand what a fire-adapted ecosystem is and combat some of the language that vilifies fire.”

“It kind of exemplified the work we do in this place-based, artistic way,” Krochta adds. And it changed the way he thought about organizing. Instead of just submitting the usual National Environmental Policy Act comments on a proposal for a fuel-thinning timber sale, he also put up a topo map where forest lovers could write or draw their connections to the place to show why it merits protection. “Hoo hoo hello owls,” one wrote, and “years of winter tracking hikes.” Even some Forest Service employees at an info session participated. “It was really amazing and powerful,” Wiseman says.

Harwood says everyone gets something different from the residencies and trips. Outside Tinderbox, the public-lands engagement part is subtle: She might spend an evening talking about the ins and outs of getting involved in land-use decisions, or building a relationship with and defending a special place. “That’s the takeaway I want people to have: That they’re welcome to be part of those conversations,” she says. “And I try to remember to just shut up and let the land speak for itself. You don’t have to say: ‘This is an old-growth tree and it’s worth protecting.’ You just walk somebody to an old-growth tree.”

]]>No publisherArtOregonPoliticsPublic LandsRecreation2016/06/27 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOregon oil train explosion fuels growing opposition movementhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/oregon-oil-train-explosion-fuels-growing-opposition-movement
Some activists see the Pacific Northwest as a major new front in the climate fight.Tucked against the steep forests and cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge on Oregon’s northern border, the town of Mosier is a modest collection of wooden homes and narrow streets that climb through oaks and droop-topped Douglas fir. From Mosier’s heart, the vast Columbia itself is invisible beyond a screen of trees, Interstate 84, and an increasingly crowded set of railroad tracks. It’s surprisingly quiet here on a sweltering Sunday in June. Though the population is just shy of 450, “town’s usually very busy,” resident Sandra Parksion tells mefrom a camp chair in the shade, where she sits beside her adult grandson, Adrian Stranz. “There are a lot of bicyclists. Hikers. Joggers. You name it. (Now) you don't see anybody wandering around. You don't hear kids hollering and playing.”

There’s also no wind this weekend, a notable absence in the Gorge, where the bluster often clocks in around 25 to 35 miles per hour. And that, some residents and local officials speculate, may be the only reason why Mosier’s still standing.

Around noon the previous Friday, part of a Union Pacific train carrying 96 tanker cars of highly volatile Bakken crude oil derailed just below Mosier’s I-84 exit overpass, 16 cars folding together in a great clanking din. Four exploded into a blaze that shot flames up to 50 feet in the air and smeared the sky with greasy, black smoke that was visible for miles.

No one was injured and only 42,000 gallons were spilled or vaporized, a tiny fraction of the total amount of oil aboard. Still, the conflagration underscored the fears of oil-train opponents, who have long warned that a boom in the transport of oil by rail through the region that began in 2012 threatens countless communities along the tracks, as well as the Columbia River itself – the largest salmon fishery in the Lower 48. More than a dozen similar disasters have taken place around the U.S. and Canada since 2013, but Mosier’s is the first serious oil train accident in the Pacific Northwest.

The timing couldn’t be worse for already struggling fossil fuel shippers, coming in the midst of an intensifying local backlash and a movement that has lately racked up significant victories against liquid natural gas and coal export terminals proposed along the coast. “In any rational universe, it’s the end of oil trains in the Northwest,” says Eric de Place, policy director for Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based progressive think tank. “But do we live in a rational universe? We’ll see.”

The steep, rugged Gorge is a terrible place for accidents: Major transportation routes are often pinched between cliffs and river, with few alternate paths. When the Mosier train blew, it closed the interstate and backed up traffic for hours on narrow bridges and winding rural roads, making access hard for emergency responders and residents alike. Parksion, who is resting just outside the Union Pacific claims trailer where she collected a hotel voucher for some air conditioning and a Safeway gift card to help feed her parakeets, was among those immediately evacuated from the nearby Mosier Manor mobile home park. When I meet her, she hasn’t been allowed to return home yet. “Somebody came to the door and said, ‘Get out now,’” Parksion says, “and that was it.”

The Mosier Community School, which was also evacuated, is perhaps 500 feet from the tracks. Volunteer firefighter Charles Young, whose eight-year-old son is a student there, had a hard time escaping visions of the wind coming up and “each train car popping one after the next for a mile, taking out the entire town.”

Mosier Fire Chief Jim Appleton expressed similar fears, after seeing just how hard the blaze was to extinguish. Even with a foam truck from the Portland airport and some 15 separate fire departments responding, the fire took until 2 a.m. on Saturday to extinguish. “I’ve been very hesitant to take a side up to now,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “But with this incident, and with all due respect to the wonderful people that I’ve met at Union Pacific, shareholder value doesn’t outweigh the lives and happiness of our community.”

A car from a derailed oil train lies in the sun as workers clean up after the train caught on fire in Mosier, Oregon.

Sarah Gilman

At a press conference on Saturday, the railroad issued a formal apology to Mosier, the state of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and promised to pay for the cost of firefighting. Spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza also noted that the company has helped train more than 2,000 Oregon first responders since 2010.

Luck is the wrong word, but it’s not a stretch to say things could have been much, much worse. A similar disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec involving older tanker cars killed 47 residents. “That's what we’ve been worrying about for the last couple of years,” Young says. “The question for me is, who’s getting the benefit for this risk? It sure as hell isn’t Mosier.”

That kind of sentiment is increasingly common in the Northwest, which is politically much less friendly to extraction than the interior West. Facing supply gluts and price crashes for Rockies and High Plains oil and natural gas, energy companies have pushed a raft of export terminal proposals along the West Coast, where they see access to new markets and higher returns. And coal companies, squeezed by cheap natural gas and new regulations, have done the same, hoping international business will stop a slide into insolvency.

The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which has been concerned about how expanded fossil fuel rail traffic will impact fishermen safety and tribal treaty fishing rights, is now tracking some 17 proposed and operating coal and oil terminals and refineries.

And the Sightline Institute has estimated the collective carbon impact of proposed coal, oil and natural gas facilities and pipelines in the Northwest at five times that of the Keystone XL Pipeline. With that project on the outs, many activists see the Northwest as the next big front in the U.S. climate fight.

To get a more concrete idea of the potential scale of increase, consider that Union Pacific has reported that it runs about three oil trains per month through the Columbia River Gorge. A proposed oil terminal on the Columbia in Vancouver, Washington, could handle five such trains per day, or some 360,000 barrels. A proposed coal terminal in nearby Longview, Washington, has capacity for seven or eight trains per day.

Given the volume, “this (derailment) was not a surprise,” says Jeremy Red Star Wolf, Vice Chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and current chair of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. The incident, he adds, has only galvanized the resolve of the Fish Commission's four member tribes to protect the river.

Scattered and burned oil tank cars after they derailed on near Mosier, Oregon. Union Pacific Railroad says it had recently inspected the section of track near Mosier, about 70 miles east of Portland.

Courtesy Columbia Riverkeeper

Some 300,000 people have commented on proposals in Washington this year, says Dan Serres, conservation director for Columbia Riverkeeper, a grassroots group that has worked with several communities to fight terminal projects.Because the infrastructure proposals clash with more than just environmental values – threatening safety, homes, recreation and other industries – the coalition of opponents is broad, from tribes to labor unions to artsy anarchists to small town politicians to a former energy executive who moved to the Northwest to grow flowers. Grandmothers have chained themselves to train tracks. Greenpeace activists have dangled from bridges.“The pressure is building,” Serres says. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, in terms of the diversity of people calling on state leaders to turn projects down.”

And they’re gaining some ground. This spring, the Army Corps of Engineers effectively killed a coal export terminal near Bellingham, Washington, because of potential impacts to the Lummi Nation’streaty rights. And last month, more than 200 people gathered in Astoria, Oregon, for a potluck and dance to celebrate the withdrawal of a liquid natural gas export terminal proposal in nearby Warrenton, following a 12-year fight.

It’s unclear how the Mosier derailment will affect Washington’s ongoing permitting processes for the Vancouver terminal. But Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, both Oregon senators and two Oregon House representatives have called for a moratorium on oil train traffic through the Columbia River Gorge until Union Pacific has a clear explanation for what caused the crash.

“A cynic might say it won’t change,” says Eric Quaempts, fisheries director for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “But the early signs are that it’s increased awareness and maybe the landscape will shift.”

While Union Pacific has so far agreed to keep oil trains out of Mosier in the aftermath, it’s worked quickly to get regular rail service back up for its other customers.

In town on Sunday, the twisted tanker cars sit in an orderly line along one side of the tracks. They’re just visible from the white-and-magenta, two-story school, which has been pressed into service as an impromptu incident command center, housing 60 or 70 people from the multiple local, state, and federal agencies involved in cleanup.

Signs on the doors warn residents to boil their water and avoid using drains or flushing toilets, because the crash damaged the sewage treatment plant. White trailers, tents and spill-response trucks line the lawn, and sheriff’s deputies man a safety checkpoint beside a farmer’s market sign. Beyond the equipment and a tangle of greenery, a hive of workers in orange safety vests and hard hats labor in hundred-degree heat to lay new rails, ties and ballast. By nightfall on the day of my visit, they will have freight trains running slowly past the yet-to-be-drained oil cars, over the oil-soaked ground, and against the wishes of Mosier City Council. Union Pacific insists that the operation is safe. “The community is at the forefront of our efforts,” spokesman Justin Jacobs told the Associated Press. “We're absolutely aware of their concerns.”

Yet residents remain wary.

“I do not want to see another big catastrophe right off the bat,” says Acting Mayor Emily Reed, Young’s wife, looking toward the construction from the schoolyard. Oil trains haven’t been a major focus for her before, Reed says with a tight laugh. “I’ll probably be more active now ... I already am.”

Parksion’s nervous, too. “This morning, out of my daughter's front window, I was watching the railroad tracks across the river,” she says. Those ones don’t belong to Union Pacific. “I saw a train go by with I don't know how many of those oil tankers. And I kept thinking, ‘Oooh, boy. Please, Lord.’”

Sarah Gilman is a High Country News contributing editor based in Portland, Oregon. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman.

This article has been updated to reflect Jeremy Red Star Wolf's full title.

]]>No publisherOilOregonEnergy & Industry2016/06/08 09:40:00 GMT-6ArticleWest Coast cities sue Monsanto to pay for chemical cleanuphttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.8/west-coast-cities-sue-monsanto-to-pay-for-chemical-cleanup
Cities take a new tack to fight pollutants: targeting companies who make them.Portland, Oregon’s Willamette is no wilderness river. But on a spring day, downstream of downtown, wildness peeks through. Thick forest rises beyond a tank farm on the west bank. A sea lion thrashes to the surface, wrestling a salmon. And as Travis Williams, executive director of the nonprofit Willamette Riverkeeper, steers our canoe under a train bridge — dodging debris tossed by jackhammering workers — ospreys wing into view.

The 10-mile reach, known as Portland Harbor, became a Superfund Site in 2000. Over the last century, ships were built and decommissioned here, chemicals and pesticides manufactured, petroleum spilled, and sewage and slaughterhouse waste allowed to flow. Pollution has decreased, but toxic chemicals linger in sediments. Resident fish like bass and carp are so contaminated that riverside signs warn people against eating them, though some do. And osprey can’t read warnings, so they accumulate chemicals, which can thin eggshells and harm chicks.

Among the worst are polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Used in electrical transformers, coolants, caulk, paints and other products, these probable carcinogens were banned in 1979 for their toxicity, persistence and the ease with which they escaped into the environment. Even so, they continued entering waterways through storm drains here and elsewhere.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s remediation plan for Portland Harbor’s PCBs and other pollutants, expected in May, will cost between $790 million and $2.5 billion. The city of Portland, one of 150 “potentially responsible parties” on the hook for a percentage, has already spent $62 million on studies and reports. So on March 16, the city council decided to join six other West Coast cities in suing agribusiness giant Monsanto to recoup some past and future cleanup costs. San Diego filed in 2015, and San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Spokane and Seattle followed.

Monsanto is best known for GMO crops and Roundup, but before it split from its chemical and pharmaceutical branches (also named in the suits), it was the sole U.S. PCB manufacturer from the 1930s to the late 1970s. “Monsanto knew that if you used (these products) for their intended purpose, PCBs would leach into the environment,” says Portland City Attorney Tracy Reeve, but it sold the chemicals anyway. “We believe that polluters, not the public, should pay.”

A victory would not only inspire more PCB lawsuits, it could suggest a pathway to help fill gaps in U.S. chemical regulation, says University of Richmond School of Law professor Noah Sachs, who specializes in toxics and hazardous waste. The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, inspired in part by PCBs, has a weak review process and generally doesn’t require health and safety testing of chemicals before manufacturers can sell them. And the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — CERCLA, the Superfund law — is concerned with who spilled or arranged to dispose of chemicals at a site, not who made them. “What we see here is testing a new legal theory,” Sachs says. “I hope companies that know their hazardous products are escaping into the environment are held accountable for the damage they’re doing.”

A canoe casts off from Cathedral Park under the St. Johns Bridge, part of a stretch of the Willamette River laced with PCBs and other pollutants.

Cathy Cheney/Portland Business Journal

The cases’ novelty arises from their application of state public nuisance laws. Each seeks to prove that Monsanto compromised public use and enjoyment of waterways by marketing and selling this class of chemicals while well aware of its dangers. The Seattle complaint, for example, cites internal memos from the ’60s in which company officials discuss PCBs as “an uncontrollable pollutant,” noting their global spread and harm to people and wildlife. There is “no practical course of action that can so effectively police the uses of these products as to prevent environmental contamination,” a Monsanto committee wrote in 1969. “There are, however a number of actions which must be undertaken to prolong the manufacture, sale and use of these particular Aroclors” — the company’s trademarked name for certain PCB compounds.

The cases follow on a stunning 2014 victory in the Superior Court of California. There, a judge found three companies had created a public nuisance by marketing and selling lead-based paint while knowing its health hazards, and ruled they should pay $1.15 billion into an abatement fund to remove it from homes. The Monsanto cases likely have a stronger public nuisance claim, says University of California Davis environmental law professor Albert Lin, because, unlike residences, “waterways are clearly public resources.” Monsanto’s role as sole manufacturer also simplifies efforts to connect the company to contaminated areas.

Nonetheless, “the plaintiffs face an uphill climb,” says Peter Hsiao, an environmental attorney for international law firm Morrison & Foerster. The lead paint case is being appealed, he notes, and similar lead paint lawsuits failed in six other states. Attempts to use public nuisance law to address climate change, with California going after automakers, for example, have also foundered. Still, he worries a win could have an unintended chilling effect on innovation, “depriving society of the enormous benefit that comes from the safe and effective use of chemicals.”

First, though, the lawsuits must reach trial. Monsanto has been filing motions to dismiss each case — arguing that it never had a manufacturing presence on the West Coast and never discharged anything there. The first motion, against San Diego, will be heard in court May 25. “The allegations … are without merit,” Monsanto spokeswoman Charla Lord wrote in an email. If “companies or other third parties improperly disposed of (PCB) products and created the need for the cleanup of any waterways, then they bear responsibility for the costs.”

]]>No publisherPollutionCaliforniaEconomyNorthwestOregonRivers & LakesSocial Justice2016/05/16 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleIF YOU GOhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.4/protecting-the-oregon-trail-from-the-development-it-helped-create/if-you-go
Oregon National Historic TrailIndependence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon505-988-6098]]>No publisher2016/03/07 04:10:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbProtecting the Oregon Trail from the development it helped createhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.4/protecting-the-oregon-trail-from-the-development-it-helped-create
Dedicated volunteers fight to preserve one of the trails that brought settlers west. I close my eyes. Beneath my feet are the ruts of the Oregon Trail, left by thousands of covered wagons that settlers used to haul belongings from Missouri to the valleys beyond the Cascades, back during the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s. Even then, the route wasn’t new: Fur trappers and missionaries used it, and so, for millennia, did Native peoples.

Today, it’s the designated Oregon National Historic Trail, administered by the National Park Service and mostly visited by history enthusiasts like Carbiener and his wife, Muriel. This particular stretch, northwest of Ontario, Oregon, was a brutally dry 25 miles between the algae-choked Malheur River and a final crossing of the Snake River called Farewell Bend. I conjure creaking leather, plodding livestock, and sunburnt families on foot. It’s not easy: The ruts look more like an eroded ditch grown over with sagebrush. I can faintly hear traffic on Interstate 84, out of sight beyond a hill that fails to conceal a cellphone tower.

The visual intrusion makes 81-year-old Carbiener scowl beneath his John Deere ball cap, but otherwise, the white-grassed hills appear mostly unchanged since the 19th century. That’s why the Carbieners so love this spot, called Birch Creek. Those early travelers “would talk about coming up to a ridge, and as far as the eye could see, they saw wagons,” Gail Carbiener continues. “And so the dust here was unbelievable. The diaries would say that it was so thick, we can’t see the oxen in front of the wagon.”

To complete the scene, I glance at Muriel Carbiener. She performs living history at the High Desert Museum in Bend, where the couple lives, and today, she’s in character. A bonnet covers her close-cropped hair and a floral-print dress hangs to her ankles, cinched with a slightly tattered apron. “And of course there’s a corset,” the diminutive 79-year-old laughs, to “keep the girls in. Do you want to walk 2,000 miles without any support?”

The Carbieners want me to stand in pioneers’ boots, but they’ve brought me here to imagine something else: lattice towers up to 195 feet tall marching along a nearby ridgeline. Though the Park Service is charged with protecting the trail, it doesn’t actually have control over the 2,250-mile long corridor, which crosses a patchwork of federal, state and private land. This spot belongs to the Bureau of Land Management, and it’s contemplating routes for the Boardman to Hemingway Transmission Line Project, or B2H — a 300-mile, 500-kilovolt powerline between Boardman, Oregon, and the Hemingway substation near Melba, Idaho. Idaho Power, the utility that proposed the project, says the B2H will enable electricity sharing between the Northwest and the Intermountain West, helping meet new demand as the ­population grows.

[SIDEBAR]

According to the BLM’s 2014 draft environmental impact statement, the line could also cross the Oregon Trail a dozen times and be visible from up to 80 percent of it within the project area. Much of the trail corridor is already significantly altered, but about 18 percent in Oregon still has intact ruts and relatively pristine views. That includes significant portions of this stretch, which the BLM’s preferred route would parallel south of where we stand and cross just to the north, causing, as the agency acknowledges, “direct, long-term adverse impacts to the visual setting.” Farther northwest, the line could sweep across the viewshed of other fairly pristine sections of trail and the BLM’s National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside Baker City.

The Park Service has expressed serious concerns about those impacts. And the Oregon-California Trails Association, to which the Carbieners belong, is pushing for the line to be rerouted if not stopped altogether — putting the organization in the interesting position of defending a historic agent of development from a modern one. “We’re a bunch of damn old folks that just like to go out and walk the ruts! And then all of a sudden, we’re realizing that they’re disappearing,” says Gail Carbiener.“Our concern is that we can’t afford to lose any more. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Muriel, in 1852 period garb, and Gail Carbiener, who have helped erect Oregon Trail signs and markers, walk on the Oregon Trail at Birch Creek.

Otto Kitsinger

What exactly is lostwhen parts of the Oregon Trail succumb to development? The events are over, the people long dead, and the corridor itself is less a continuous trail than a series of car-accessible historic sites and segments. First and foremost, today’s trail is a story. And the one most often told is of ordinary people enduring an incredibly difficult months-long journey in search of new beginnings. The rhetoric that helped inspire the first waves of the 300,000 to 500,000 settlers who headed west along the Overland Trails often highlighted their character in the face of privation and struggle, and glorified them as the vanguard of the new nation’s aggressive expansion. The pioneers themselves later formed societies to celebrate a similar notion of their experience — one in which, Benjamin Franklin Owen wrote in 1853, men and women “had a fair test as to the stuff they were made of.”

Their pride also hinged on the conversion of the region’s land into thriving farms, ranches and settlements. Whether the settlers acknowledged it or not, that land was “empty” only because of the brutal displacement of Native people. But when the U.S. fell victim to widespread economic depression around the turn of the century, the romantic idea of the frontier gained even more traction. In the ensuing “cultural crisis,” historian Peter Boag writes, “efforts intensified to remember Oregon’s pioneer generation as representative of a cheerier and more heroic phase of the local past.”

It’s not surprising, then, that many early attempts to commemorate the Overland Trails were themselves development proposals, calling for paved roads along the wagon routes to encourage growth. Between 1906 and 1928, the most famous Oregon Trail campaigner, an elderly, ambitiously bearded former pioneer named Ezra Meeker, crossed the country several times, in part to promote a memorial highway. Twice, he retraced the Oregon Trail by covered wagon. He also went by car with covered-wagon carapace, by plane, and by train — his vehicles mirroring the transformation of the West, for better or worse.

It wasn’t until Congress designated the trails under the 1968 National Trails System Act that preserving their remains became a formal federal priority. The Oregon and Mormon Pioneer trails were listed in 1978, and the California and Pony Express trails in 1992. “In many ways,” historian Will Bagley wrote for the Park Service in 2007, the four trails’ 11,000-mile web constitutes “America’s longest and narrowest national park, stretching from the Missouri River to the Great Salt Lake and beyond the summits of the Sierra Nevada and the ­Cascades.”

An illustration depicts an Oregon Trail “oroboros,” which is a symbol of continuing cycles and re-creation.

Sarah Gilman

“What we’re trying to define is a moment in time that has disappeared,” explains Aaron Mahr, superintendent of the Park Service’s National Trails Intermountain Region. Preserved ruts, a long view, an important mountain pass, a spire of rock repeatedly noted in old journals — all provide anchor points for contemporary travelers to connect historic events to the places where they occurred, illuminating the pioneer experience. “The landscape,” agency archaeologist Lee Kreutzer says, “is part of the trail.”

But preservation is complex. The Park Service relies on partnerships with the Forest Service and the BLM to protect trail corridors and help provide interpretation, as well as with state historical offices, tribes, and private landowners. Nonprofit volunteer organizations also provide labor and expertise. Among them is the Oregon-California Trails Association, or OCTA, which has about 1,400 members and draws half its budget from the Park Service. It was founded in 1982 after an Oregon farmer plowed up a mile of ruts to plant potatoes; the trails were vanishing even as preservation efforts ramped up.

And no wonder: “What made a good route of travel in 1840 makes a good route of travel in 2016,” says Kreutzer, who tracks projects on federal land that might affect the trail. Aside from being swallowed by farms and settlements, stretches of the Oregon Trail have long since disappeared under modern highways like I-84. Utility corridors parallel it. Natural gas fields and pipelines gnaw at the sage flats surrounding it and other trails. Overuse can even be a problem, with thousands of Mormon pilgrims hauling heavy handcarts across a Wyoming stretch of trail each summer. But wind farms and new powerlines like the B2H are the biggest worry, simply because they’re tall enough to bite into the vistas that support the vicarious emigrant ­experience.

Preserving historic trails is just one of many legal mandates that the Forest Service and BLM must balance, and neither of the agencies have any say on private land, home to an estimated 1,700 miles of the Oregon Trail, explains Kreutzer. “And the National Historic Preservation Act is just not that strong. All (the Park Service) can do is speak up and hope to be heard.”

“Sometimes that works straightaway, or you get some compromise,” says OCTA’s national preservation officer, Jere Krakow, who held Mahr’s superintendent position until 2007and is now monitoring 29 projects in nine states. Still,“We try to preserve everything, knowing that we’re going to lose.”

Gail Carbiener discusses a photograph that is marked to show where power lines might obstruct the view from Oregon Trail wagon ruts south of Birch Creek, according to one route proposed in the 2014 draft environmental impact statement.

Otto Kitsinger

The land west of Ontario,population 11,000, is remarkably flat. From the town’s assembly of chain motels and restaurants, tilled earth sweeps toward the hills in all directions, peppered with houses, windrows, and, improbably, two fighter planes parked amid low prefab buildings. Gail Carbiener steers the Jeep through the tiny community of Vale, where stoic-looking settlers and a single Indian stare from a grocery-store mural. Technically, we’re back on the trail, buried under Glenn Street, but we’re bound for a stretch of pristine ruts farther south, beyond the B2H’s reach. “Tell her about how you were in the bathroom and the Donners were there!” Carbiener calls to his wife.

The Donner Party was a group of emigrants trapped by snow in California’s Sierra in 1846, who may have resorted to cannibalizing their dead to survive. “When I meet descendants of real people, I really get excited,” Muriel Carbiener elaborates. The couple was visiting Donner Memorial State Park when Muriel emerged from a restroom stall to find two Donner relatives: The family, it turned out, was there observing the ordeal’s sesquicentennial. She clasps her hands jubilantly. “It was just like, AAAHH!”

Muriel Kilgo intended to major in history at UC-Berkeley, but married Gail Carbiener instead. After the Carbieners’ children finished school, she returned to her studies, focusing on emigrant women’s lives, and earned her degree in 1990. When she dragged her skeptical husband, a retired banker, to an OCTA convention in 1994, he was hooked, too. One of his ancestors traveled the Mormon Pioneer Trail, and he likes to think he also would have come West; he’s always loved the mountains.

Since then, the Carbieners have collected 200 books and diaries on the emigrant trails and have explored them extensively. Gail Carbiener volunteers a few weeks each year for federal agencies, sleuthing historical sites with a cadre of other metal-detector-wielding old guys, under the supervision of an archaeologist. With OCTA, the couple erects directional and interpretive signs, and Gail Carbiener has even re-cast concrete trail markers in home-built molds.

After we park below a gap in the hills called Keeney Pass, Carbiener tenderly takes his wife’s arm and they stroll along the wagon track through the sage. “You’re camping in a cesspool and you’re walking in one,” Muriel Carbiener reminds me cheerfully. The trail would have been littered with livestock feces and carcasses, denuded of grass for miles around. To lighten the load, people often jettisoned belongings — a piano, libraries of books, thousands of pounds of bacon, even a diving bell — a wake stretching back to Missouri.

Many died from cholera or drowning. Others, according to historian John D. Unruh, died as a result of “careless handling of the fantastical arsenal of firearms” they dragged west. Some, perhaps, even succumbed to despair. A plaque at the grave of John D. Henderson, which we visit next, notes mournfully: “Died of Thirst, August 9, 1852, Unaware of the Nearness of the Malheur River … Proved too Great a Struggle for the Weary Travelers.” Those remembered hardships retain their power, especially for pioneer descendants. David Welch, former OCTA president and national preservation officer, describes his sense of connection to a little-changed landscape in Nevada, where his great-great-grandmother walked while nine months pregnant. Amateur historian Stafford Hazelett says perfect strangers reach out to him for help finding the exact places along the trails where their ancestors are buried.

Muriel Carbiener carries paper towels and water to clean signs and marked graves. Sometimes, she feels ghosts with her. “It seems like you take care of these like you might take care of a family member’s grave,” I observe.

“Gosh,” she says, as if surprised. “Maybe more than a family member’s.”

“It’s personal,” her husband adds. “It really is.”

That might explain the vehemence with which he’s fought the B2H. He’s driven to Eugene to meet with environmental lawyers, Skyped with law students, and, with OCTA, has signed onto a lengthy comment letter opposing the project alongside hardline environmental groups like Oregon Wild. Just before I met the Carbieners, the BLM dismissed Gail from a special committee reviewing the proposal: He had inadvertently shared privileged information in an anti-B2H letter to the editor.

It’s uncertain how the powerline will affect Birch Creek and the pristine segment to the south, called Alkali Springs. The final environmental study won’t be out until summer. And because powerlines traverse their own patchwork of public and private land, they’re perhaps as hard to build as the trail is to protect. The alternative routes here have their own controversies: One would pass through more farmland, potentially disrupting irrigation and crop dusting, says BLM Vale District project coordinator Renée Straub, and both cross more habitat that is considered a priority for greater sage grouse.

Recent preliminary maps suggest the BLM may be leaning away from the route that most impacts the Oregon Trail here. But its preference for the section near the interpretive center appears little changed, and 35,000 to 40,000 people visit that site annually. Other alternatives for that spot, at least those that have been analyzed, are more problematic; the only one that would mostly bypass the trail would detour far from existing utility and transportation corridors, slicing through more intact forest and big game and sage grouse habitat. “It’s not always feasible,” says Straub, “to protect everything when we’re trying to balance all these resources.”

Before I leave the Carbieners, we stop at McDonald’s. Muriel elucidates the finer points of emigrant cuisine as she nibbles a burger: “Beans … and beans … and beans.” The list underscores the relief they probably felt trading with tribes for salmon and vegetables. Early on, Native Americans often helped travelers with dangerous river crossings and route finding, especially in Oregon. Sometimes, Muriel Carbiener says, “the Indians wanted to charge people for crossing their land, and most whites refused to do that.” She pauses. “We were mean and nasty.”

That hints at a painful side of trail history that the Carbieners frankly acknowledge. Empowered by a sense of divine destiny, the emigrants squatted on tribe-owned lands, overgrazed grass tribes needed for their horses, depleted wild game, destroyed staple camas meadows, fouled drinking water, and inadvertently devastated Native American populations with novel diseases like measles — ultimately leading to bloody clashes as settlement swept the region. “This is our history,” Muriel says circumspectly. “None of us would be here unless these people had done this.”

“I think these stories are a part of us,” OCTA’s Krakow says later. They carry a lot of the nation’s formative values, “and not all of those are good ones.”

There are more than two dozen murals in Vale, Oregon. This one, called Death on the Trail, is on the side of a Les Schwab Tire building.

Otto Kitsinger

One of more than two dozen Oregon Trail murals in Vale, Oregon.

Otto Kitsinger

Hitíim̀ecix Wéetešne — They are marking the land. The Nez Perce phrase appears on a text panel at the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute. About 160 miles northwest of Ontario on I-84, it’s the only tribal interpretive center on the designated Oregon Trail route. The panel describes the treaty process that carved up the Columbia Plateau, forcing the Umatilla, Cayuse and Walla Walla to surrender their lands alongside other tribes in 1855. Beside it, there’s a map of the tiny trapezoid that became the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where Tamástslikt is located, contrasted against the vast expanse of ceded ancestral territory.

Much of the B2H’s length, it turns out, falls inside that ceded land, where the Umatilla, Cayuse and Walla Walla — now the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation — still have treaty-protected hunting and fishing rights. While the tribes have no official position on the line, their formal comments fault the BLM for not adequately consulting them about the project’s possible impacts on archaeological resources, as well as the continuing uses and cultural significance of the land. In fact, the tribes preferred the proposed routings that most irk Oregon Trail advocates because they’re closer to existing development and appear less harmful to wildlife. “Our first priority is preservation of tribal cultural history and treaty rights,” explains Chuck Sams, tribal government spokesman. But “we want to ensure that the line has negligible impacts on everyone’s historical background.”

“All of that is part of our past, too,” Bobbie Conner, Tamástslikt’s director since 1998, tells me later. “I believe the wagon ruts tell an important story. I understand what enlightenment it brings people to know the struggles of their ancestors.” She notes her own blended heritage: Umatilla, Cayuse and Nez Perce, with a last name from a Scotch-Irish ancestor. Still, she adds, “There is much that we wish to protect that’s much older. We’ve been here in this landscape for more than 10,000 years. And we don’t ever expect to leave.”

It’s this last message that Tamástslikt most conveys. In addition to showcasing tribes’ rich histories and covering the dark years of land division and forced assimilation that followed white settlement, it takes visitors up to the present, as the tribes restored water and salmon to local rivers emptied by irrigation and built a modern economy while still maintaining traditional culture. Núun Wišíix, reads a wall near the end of the exhibit: We are.

Such inclusive histories have been slow to catch on at other emigrant trail interpretive sites. Recognizing the problem, the Park Service began holding tribal listening sessions about five years ago to build relationships and find ways to integrate tribes’ perspectives. The agency has worked with Oglala Lakota College students to collect oral histories from elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation for use in a trail interpretive film, for example, and the BLM hopes to use Park Service funds for an exhibit exploring Native Americans’ experience of the Oregon Trail.

But no matter how close the agencies get to telling the Oregon Trail’s complete story, the scars of land theft and its legacy remain. No signs on I-84 identify the ancestral homelands of the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla. A casual traveler would have no idea they used these routes in a seasonal migration for food long before the pioneers, or that the tribes are still deeply invested in this landscape. The Oregon Trail, meanwhile, is marked with signs likely to catch the eyes of even incurious drivers, emblazoned with the symbol of this region’s conquest: A covered wagon. As University of Oregon emeritus professor Matthew Dennis writes, “history and memory are not merely ways of recollecting the past but are also means of obscuring and forgetting it.”

Wagon ruts on the Oregon Trail at Keeney Pass south of Vale, Oregon.

Otto Kitsinger

The sky is fading to pink when I exit the interstate one last time, then wind through alfalfa fields. Center-pivot sprinklers loom like giant mantises, and gray birds blink through my headlights. Beyond someone’s farmhouse and up a gravel road, I park at a picnic shelter and set out down an asphalt path buckled by tumbleweeds. It’s completely dark by the time I find the cement obelisk marking a stretch of wagon ruts at Echo Meadows. To the northwest, red lights atop the Columbia Gorge’s thicket of windmills pulse with cardiac regularity.

I follow the bright spark of reflective trail markers in the other direction, towards a black horizon crowned with stars. I think of the rest areas along 84, with their Oregon Trail kiosks — of the families adjusting baggage in their SUVs, the truck drivers hunched into cellphone conversations. I think of the people who honor pioneer ancestors, and those who make a hobby of following emigrants’ footsteps. Few among them could claim roots in this region more than a handful of generations deep. Perhaps the trail helps them feel that they belong, both to history and to the landscape itself.

As a recent transplant to Oregon, I pause to see if I, too, might experience something like Muriel Carbiener’s communion with ghosts. I hear rustles and squeaks in the head-high sage. But all I feel is the disquieting sense of drift that comes from being in constant motion—just one more emigrant shifting between the hubs of a society that is forever pressing outward, devouring new places. History aside, perhaps the best reason to preserve these last shreds of trail and the sweeping views around them is as reference points that help us remember how much the land has changed — and is still changing.

Sarah Gilman unwittingly traveled parts of the Oregon Trail on her way to and from college in southeastern Washington in the early 2000s. She is a High Country News contributing editor in Portland, Oregon. Follow @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherNational Park ServiceOregonTravelFeaturesHistoryEnergy & Industry2016/03/07 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleCan drilling and recreation get along in Moab, Utah?https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.19/can-drilling-and-recreation-get-along-in-moab-utah
The BLM unveils the unprecedented plan to balance oil and gas with conservation in canyon country. Neal Clark has been watching his feet a lot this fall day. The young environmental lawyer chose flipflops for our tour of the Utah desert with the blithe self-assurance of someone comfortable outdoors. Remarkably, he’s stumbled into thorns only once. Now, he cautiously threads a gap between banks of cryptobiotic crust. The castle-like colonies of microorganisms anchor the thin topsoil; no conscientious environmentalist would crush them. But Clark pauses: Just ahead, an oil rig towers on a patch of earth scraped bare to accommodate trucks and equipment. “There’s something ironic about tiptoeing around crust next to something like this,” he says wryly.

That incongruity stretches far beyond this spot. Clark, who works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is showing me around some Bureau of Land Management parcels that are being developed for oil and gas near Canyonlands National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park and some of the other scenic areas that have made nearby Moab an outdoor recreation mecca.

Fidelity Exploration & Production Company has 31 oil wells here, most drilled in recent years. Though the National Park Service and BLM credit Fidelity with keeping its facilities as low-impact as possible, many feel the development illustrates why the BLM should plan much more carefully where and how drilling is allowed. “This is one of the most spectacular places on the planet,” Clark argues. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to allow oil companies to disturb this landscape.”

Hoping to strike a better balance, in August, the BLM released a draft “master leasing plan” for nearly 800,000 federal acres here that would significantly curtail future development near national parks, trails and other sensitive sites. It proposes to put 145,000 acres off-limits, up from 753, and to increase the acreage where surface energy infrastructure is prohibited from 134,000 to 306,000. “This is a turning point for the recreation world,” says Ashley Korenblat of Moab’s Western Spirit Cycling. “Suddenly we have standing.”

BLM policies have long favored oil and gas. Last year, The Wilderness Society found that 90 percent of the agency’s Western lands were open to leasing. The Moab plan is part of a five-year-old Obama administration effort to give more weight to other interests. Proponents say its zoning-style approach is a model for how to resolve conflicts between drilling and other values — including wildlife, hiking, biking and even four-wheeling — by heading them off before they start.

But only seven of the dozen master leasing plans underway in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah have been finalized, most this summer. None have yet been implemented, raising questions about how the approach will fare if the next administration swings right. “It really matters what BLM leadership is going to do, come 2016,” says Matt Lee-Ashley of the Center for American Progress, who was deputy chief of staff to former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “Hopefully, by then it will be a tool that the agency is more experienced and comfortable with, and it will survive regardless of whether political winds change in D.C.”

Neal Clark of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance overlooks a gas pad on BLM land near the Island in the Sky entrance to Canyonlands National Park.

Sarah Gilman

Master leasing plans sprang from the notorious 2008 Utah oil and gas lease auction where environmental activist Tim DeChristopher bid on parcels near Canyonlands, Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument to keep them undeveloped, and ended up in prison. At Salazar’s order, a team reviewed 77 contested leases and found that some should never have been auctioned, while others merited stronger restrictions.

Those problems were systemic, says then-BLM Director Bob Abbey. “We inherited an oil and gas program where over 50 percent of leasing decisions were being protested and litigated. There was no certainty for anyone.”

Field offices leaned heavily on their resource management plans — blueprints for managing huge landscapes that tend not to account for on-the-ground nuances, such as whether potential leases are within sight of trails. Unless plans explicitly withdrew land from leasing, companies could nominate it and the BLM would go ahead, worrying about mitigation when companies applied to drill. “That’s not a good approach,” Abbey says. “There are areas where natural, cultural and even visual resources are so valued that you need to do a better job up-front analyzing whether a certain area should be leased at all. Because once you lease it, you’re committing it to development.”

So in May 2010, the agency instituted reforms that, among other things, required field offices to undertake master leasing plans for areas that met certain criteria: They needed to be substantially unleased, have mostly federal mineral rights, possess hydrocarbon reserves, and have the potential for significant conflicts with clean air, recreation, wilderness or other values.

But the reforms proceeded at a sluggish pace. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened just a few weeks earlier, diverting officials’ attention to strengthening offshore policies. The BLM’s massive sage grouse planning effort began that year, too, and many field offices were tangled in resource management plan revisions.

Financial constraints didn’t help: Utah BLM put four other plans on hold so it could finish the high-profile Moab plan. Utah’s congressional delegation and its state government opposed the effort. And there was reluctance within the BLM itself: “It was a brand-new concept in an area that the agency has historically not exercised a lot of discretion,”says Nada Culver, director of The Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center. “The attitude was that we have to keep everything open in case the oil and gas industry wants it.”

Even so, the concept gradually caught on. In some parts of Colorado, including North Park, South Park and a small chunk of the state’s southwestern corner, the BLM had initially resisted undertaking- a master leasing plan. Now, however, those areas have completed plans or have begun processes for them. And even though conservationists feel some plans don’t go far enough, progress has been made toward resolving conflicts. Thanks to the protections laid out in one Colorado master leasing plan adjacent to Dinosaur National Monument, for example, some regional and national environmental groups aren’t fighting BLM’s allowance for 15,000 new wells in that region, Culver says.

Meanwhile, “lease sales have generally been more thoughtful,” says Steve Bloch, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance legal director. Indeed, the number of leases offered nationwide has dropped by half since 2008. The recession has something to do with that, but the proportion of leases protested has fallen steadily too, from 41 percent in 2010, to less than 20 percent in 2014.

Landscape-level planning takes time, says former Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes: “You have to walk before you run. And (master leasing plans) are moving at a nice walking pace here.” Abbey, however, admits disappointment: “None of us anticipated the amount of time it would take the agency to complete.”

Moab’s plan has moved particularly slowly because it’s among the most complex, tackling mining for potash, a potassium fertilizer, as well as oil and gas. The agency also included a substantial extra step in the public process, collecting feedback on a suite of possible approaches before creating the draft plan. An independent stakeholder group provided additional support, outreach and feedback.

The resulting draft plan’s preferred path forward increases protections over the entire area, closes unleased BLM lands near Arches and Canyonlands to mineral development, and creates buffers around popular climbing and canyoneering -areas, trails, cultural sites, popular filming locations, viewpoints and access roads. Still, conservationists worry that it gives managers too much leeway to waive some protections, and that it doesn’t adequately safeguard a popular stretch of the Green River that winds through Labyrinth Canyon.

Companies and trade associations, meanwhile, dismiss the argument that leasing plans provide more certainty. The regulations are redundant, argues Fidelity’s Tim Rasmussen: “We think (the Moab plan) penalizes energy development without considering the socio-economic benefits that it brings to the area.” It’s also unclear how far the BLM will go in imposing the new protections on existing leases when companies apply for drilling permits.

But the benefits of the intensive public process are clear. The Moab City Council has endorsed the plan. And after three incumbents were swept from the Grand County Council last fall, that body withdrew its request for the BLM to leave things as they are, though it hasn’t commented on the new plan. Even Utah may be softening. In 2013, it hired Brad Peterson to be its first director of outdoor recreation, giving that industry a much stronger voice in state government. “So far, my general take is that support for the (Moab plan) is tentatively growing,” Peterson says. As the state’s powerhouse recreation economy expands, “people are starting to understand what the benefits would be in the future.”

One of those benefits is increased local input on leasing decisions, which could help them stick regardless of who’s in the White House. Even the growing movement among conservative states to take over federal lands is about wanting local control over management, Peterson points out. “The master leasing plan in South Park was proposed by the county with the backing of three Republican commissioners,” adds Culver. “Once you let people see that they have a voice, it’s very hard to take it away.”

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryOilNatural GasPublic LandsRecreationPoliticsUtahBureau of Land Management2015/11/09 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleIs this climate change-battered conifer migrating northward?https://www.hcn.org/articles/is-this-climate-change-battered-conifer-migrating-northward-1
Scientists in Alaska are mapping what may be the tip of yellow cedar’s expanding range.We are high in the fold of a steep, boggy valley when my friend Sarah spots our quarry tucked amidst blueberry and dark hemlocks. The first yellow cedar is spindly, no more than four inches in diameter, with striated reddish bark and drooping feathery fronds that seem to fit the sodden, misty September day. We poke around and find another, then another; there are a couple hundred of the trees in this stand, leaning over a cascading stream and spaced out along a hairpin bend in the trail that leads up to a Forest Service cabin above Juneau, Alaska.

A healthy yellow cedar in one of the expanding stands at the species' northern range edge, on Douglas Island near Juneau, Alaska.

Sarah Gilman

Young as they are, they look a bit scraggly to my untrained eye, but they’re a small bright spot in an otherwise dark story: Yellow cedar, a culturally and commercially important tree prized for its strong, remarkably decay-resistant wood, has died in droves thanks to long-term climatic shifts, and will likely lose much more as human-induced warming advances. And yet here, the trees seem to be thriving. Scientists studying this and 14 other scattered, isolated stands around Juneau believe they may represent a leading edge of the tree’s migration northward into more favorable climes. The researchers hope the trees will yield clues on how best to conserve the species as temperatures climb.

“One thing that seems to be coming out of the data is that these are new stands,” says disturbance ecologist Brian Buma, an assistant professor at University of Alaska Southeast who has been working on the project for three years. “There are not a lot of dead trees (in them), if any. They’re young — all less than 500 years old. And they seem to be expanding: The edges have some growth.”

Yellow cedars’ trials began in the late 1800s, around the time a cooling period called the Little Ice Age ended. Based on 30 years of research, scientists concluded in a comprehensive 2012 BioScience paper that, as snowpacks have thinned in the decades since, the trees’ shallow roots have had less insulation against cold snaps that still barrel in from the Arctic and the boreal forests of neighboring Canada, particularly in boggy areas where those roots tend to be even closer to the soil surface. In other words, even though natural climate cycles and our fossil-fuel guzzling ways have been driving temperatures higher, the trees have essentially been freezing to death. This April, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service even began mulling whether they warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Seventy percent of mature yellow cedar are now dead in affected areas south of Juneau along a more than 600-mile swath of the tree’s mostly coastal range, which stretches from high elevation pockets in Oregon and Washington all the way to southern Alaska’s archipelagos and fjords. Because the trunks stand so long after death, says Paul Hennon, a Forest Service research plant pathologist and theBioScience study’s lead author, “people call them skeleton forests.”

A yellow cedar skeleton forest in the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness, near the current northern edge of climate induced tree mortality.

Lauren E. Oakes

Over his years of studying the trees’ decline, Hennon also cataloged sightings people reported of healthy trees around Juneau, at the northeastern terminus of cedars’ range. Buma and masters student John Krapek compiled this information with other anecdotal reports, historical records, and surveys by local naturalists and set about finding the stands on the ground and mapping them. The search was “like a little treasure hunt,” Buma says, albeit one that occasionally involved brutal bushwhacks up steep cliffs over multiple days before a single tree could be confirmed. The researchers also noted the circumstances under which the trees grew, such as whether they were on north facing slopes. That data could help them locate other stands, as well as inform any future efforts to plant the tree in greater numbers at this more favorable margin of its range. Boosting cedars’ flight northward may ultimately be necessary for conserving the species: Though the trees do seem to be migrating, it’s at an Ent-like pace. “They’re maybe advancing at a rate of only 80 kilometers over several centuries,” says Buma. “That’s pretty pathetic. We hoped it would be faster. You know, you’re always kind of rooting for the little guys.”

And even though trees within the Juneau stands are growing quickly, there are few saplings in the mix with seedlings and bigger trees, says Krapek. That suggests something is stopping seedlings from growing toward maturity — possibly Sitka blacktailed deer, which favor them as a food source — perhaps slowing stands’ expansion.

Worse, evidence from elsewhere within the species’ northern range is less rosy. Stanford research associate Lauren Oakes found recent mortality along the coast of the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness about 70 miles west of Juneau, and documented turnover of areas with heavy cedar mortality to western hemlock-dominated forests. She and Hennon also have a new study in Biological Conservation that shows trees north of those areas are beginning to display snowpack-related stress, too. It projects similar yellow cedar declines yet farther north in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, where stands are still healthy, based on climate models that take into account snowpack and soil drainage.

But a broader Forest Service snow modeling effort — part of a report that will be released in about a month — has left Hennon with some hope. Yes, some areas with healthy cedar stands will lose a lot of their snow over the coming decades, and thus a lot of their cedars. But “we expect that there are pretty sizeable areas where they’d remain healthy,” he says, particularly on the mountainous mainland right up against the Canadian border. “Even with reduced snow levels, our expectation is that there will still be enough snow to protect the cedars there. And those are highly protected landscapes with no timber harvesting.”

Sarah Gilman is a High Country News contributing editor based in Portland, Oregon. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeForestsU.S. Forest ServicePlantsAlaskaScientific ResearchNew Research2015/10/19 02:15:00 GMT-6ArticleClaustrophilia: Do wide-open lands bring us closer together?https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.16/claustrophilia-do-wide-open-lands-bring-us-closer-together
A writer finds that Colorado small-town life and Mongolian mishaps strengthen her human connections.And yet here we are, picking up another passenger. She looks like she weighs maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, but where will she fit? There’s a slim gap between Jo and her neighbor; the newcomer clambers over and wedges in sideways. Finally, finally, after six hours of waiting, the driver decides that we’re full. He grinds into gear and we chug free of Murun, Mongolia — capital of the country’s northernmost province — toward the remote village of Tsagaan Nuur, near the Russian border.

After 30 minutes of paved road, we veer abruptly onto a dirt two-track winding into the hills. Jo’s husband, Sean, who finished a Peace Corps assignment here in 2007, grins knowingly at Jo and me. “Jiiinkheeene,” he comments wryly, drawing out the Mongolian word. Jinkhene translates roughly as authentic, or old-school. But it can best be defined by what follows.

The Purgon bounces and shudders: The passengers brace arms against seats and each other’s knees, occasionally knocking heads. The Purgon grows steadily chillier: The passengers produce a laptop and memory stick and put together a compilation of Mongolian power ballads that the driver plays on repeat for the next 12 hours. The Purgon bogs in the mud: The passengers tumble out and push, sprinting in all directions when it lurches free at high speed. Through it all, everyone smiles, everyone laughs. There’s something almost tender about the ease with which strangers drowse on each others’ shoulders through the night. Shepherd slumps against meaty policeman; meaty policeman slumps against Sean; Sean, wincing, flattens his 6-foot-4-inch frame against the Purgon wall and my feet, which I had propped up to keep my knees from cramping.

The Mongolians are better at this than us.

In my early 20s, I was in a similar situation on a Greyhound bus between Kansas City and Denver. When the sleeping teenage girl next to me began drooling on my shoulder, I felt not tenderness but silent, half-homicidal rage.

Now, though, watching these strangers touch each other as casually as friends, I feel differently. Beyond the smeared windows stretches one of the most sparsely populated landscapes in the world. There are no fences, and little interrupts the gentle roll of the steppe besides patches of dark trees and congregations of plump sheep, yaks and horses. Felt roundhouses called gers — the traditional homes of pastoral nomads — appear now and then like white buttons stitched haphazardly onto rumpled green fabric. Sean has told us about the nomads’ generosity, how they will offer even unexpected visitors salted yak-milk tea, food, a bed. And I’ve read of the blizzards and subzero cold that pummel people here each winter. Maybe, I think, in all this beautiful, brutal vastness, a tiny enclosure that brings the world to a human scale is to be shared, not defended. How else would anyone survive in such a place?

Horse tour guide Batdelger demonstrates how to befriend reindeer in the Mongolian taiga.

Sarah Gilman

When I left for the three-week summer trip to Mongolia, my friend Rob — who had been in the Peace Corps there with Sean — joked that I’d love it, since I basically already lived in Mongolia. He was referring to Paonia, Colorado, a town of 1,500 on the rural Western Slope of the Rockies, where I had spent the past six years. While Jo and other friends I grew up with in Boulder, Colorado, moved on to New York or L.A., Boston or Seattle, I had edged downward in town size and upward in acres of open space, from Walla Walla, Washington, to a series of small mountain towns back in our home state.

I was chasing a feeling I had one summer during college, when Jo and I took a day trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. We pulled off the road above treeline and sprinted to an overlook, racing a thunderstorm. Staring across the tundra-velveted swaybacks of retreating peaks, I knew with uncharacteristic certainty that I wanted to settle in their midst. When a permanent job opened in Paonia a few years later, I saw my chance at last.

I imagined my new life would resemble the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure, about the quirky fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Maybe I was Maggie, the hot-yet-rough-around-the-edges bush pilot, self-sufficient to a fault. True to my fantasy, I spent my free time exploring desert buttes, wandering solo through aspen groves and canyons with a heavy pack, picking my way up to the Continental Divide to peer into glacier-hewn drainages. Once, I looked up from washing dishes to see a moose wander past my kitchen window, smack in the middle of town, just like in the show’s opening credits. She was loose-jointed and gangly in that way moose have, and I followed her down the alley, ducking out of sight when her head swiveled my way.

Unlike my fantasy, though, I was desperately lonely. I worked late and came home to an empty house. The isolation of my cat, locked indoors to keep her from murdering birds, seemed a bleak metaphor for my own life. “Give it a year,” my parents said helpfully, when, curled in a ball on the porch swing, I called them one night. “Maybe it will get better.”

Better, I repeated to myself, hiking alone to the highest point on the rim of the Black Canyon southwest of town. Storms brewed over the piñon-studded horizon, unreachable across the canyon’s steep maw and its faint roar of whitewater. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t Northern Exposure’s Maggie. I was the show’s Dr. Fleischman — a citified know-it-all, bumbling through a working-class community and a landscape he didn’t understand. As thunder rumbled closer, I hurried toward lower ground. There was a crack, an explosion of stars, and I found myself sprawled in the trail, blinking stupidly up at a fat juniper branch. Lightning? No. With my head bent in thought, I had run straight into a tree. I gingerly touched my scalp; my fingers came back smeared with blood.

Anthropologists say Euro-Americans like me tend to expect more personal space than people from many other cultures. But far from crowded cities, lost in western Colorado’s wild jumble of mountains and mesas, I’d begun to want less personal space, not more. I wanted someone to share it with me.

Punsal collects milk for the day’s tea.

Sarah Gilman

Reindeer relax in the Dukha camp, deep in the taiga near Mongolia’s northern border.

Sarah Gilman

It’s veiled, white-lit dawn when Jo, Sean and I spill blinking from the Purgon in Tsagaan Nuur, where our hostess, Ulzii, greets us at her compound of tourist gers. Some other Peace Corps contacts told us she could arrange for us to travel even farther north, into some of Mongolia’s remotest country. We have our hearts set on the taiga, where an ethnically distinct people called the Dukha, also known as the Tsaatan, make their living herding reindeer and, increasingly, accommodating visitors like us. We wander blearily around Tsagaan Nuur’s scatter of buildings, buying food for the week from rickety log cabin groceries, securing the last of our permits from a military outpost. It takes a few hours and another cross-country Purgon ride for Ulzii to find the guide she has in mind.

He’s a wiry fellow named Batdelger, with steep cheekbones shaded under a ballcap. Ulzii says we’ll be able to stay with his aunt in the eastern taiga. But first, he has to wrap up the day with his sheep. An hour passes, then two. His children practice their English on us and demonstrate how to bottle-feed a spindly-legged foal. We ask Batdelger’s wife how we will make the long horseback ride to the Dukha camp before dark, and she gently ribs us about our impatience — tourists! — then pours more tea.

The horses that Batdelger finally rounds up are tiny and strong-headed, and Sean, atop a chestnut stallion, resembles a top-heavy centaur with a small and rebellious set of horse parts. My horse isn’t much more accommodating. For his clumsiness, I name him Mr. Umbles, after the symptoms of hypothermia you learn in wilderness medicine — mumbles, fumbles, tumbles. In revenge, Mr. Umbles drops suddenly to his front knees in a marsh, nearly pitching me headfirst into the mosquito-clouded shrubbery. I call him “Utaa” after that — “smoke” in Mongolian, for his dappled gray coloring — hoping this show of respect will dampen his urge to kill me.

Sometime around 9 p.m., Batdelger points out a low, doorless building where we can rest for the night. Sean asks in Mongolian if there’s shelter farther on. Batdelger says yes. We still feel good, and so continue up a valley shaggy with high grass and willow. Black stands of conifer climb its slopes to the noses and knuckles of mountaintops, which peek down like poorly concealed spies. The low sun paints Jo’s face gold as she turns in the saddle to smile at me.

We dismount on a spit where two streams meet. I glance around — there’s a well-used fire ring, but no structures. Before I left the States, I complained to Sean that I was having trouble finding room in my pack for camping equipment. He told me I could leave that gear behind: We would be staying with families in their homes. But that is not how things will work tonight. “Does he know we don’t have sleeping bags?” I ask Sean. Sean turns to Batdelger, and they speak briefly. Sean turns back to us. “This is it,” he says.

Batdelger looks exasperated. Had he known we were so poorly provisioned, he could have brought a tent, he explains calmly. Or pots to cook our dehydrated food. But somehow those details got lost in Ulzii’s negotiations, or in the gap between Sean’s days as a fluent speaker and the considerable amount of Mongolian words that have come back to him since his return. We settle down for a poor meal around a handful of blazing twigs. The bread we bought turns out to be rancid, but with enough Nutella on it, you almost can’t tell. We pass around peas, spooning directly from the can. I collect our plastic bottles and fill them in the stream, then pull out our SteriPEN to purify the water. It feels awfully light. I test the button. Nothing. Then I check the … I smile meekly at my friends. “No batteries,” I say, holding up the empty chamber.

As the last light fades, Batdelger stalks off with his short saddle pad to find a place to sleep. We collect our own pads in tense silence, then poke through the trees until we settle on a lumpy but soft deposit of needles. Even wrapped in every piece of clothing we have, it is a cold and miserable night. Jo is the smallest, so we sandwich her in the middle. She attaches to my back like a hungry lamprey, and Sean to hers. When we turn over, we do so in unison, unwilling to give up each others’ heat. My feet grow numb, and I flex my stiff hands. I imagine Utaa, hobbled in the meadow below, laughing. Who’s Mr. Umbles now, he would say in Mongolian.

Dukha children offer a wood chip that bears striking resemblance to a cracker.

Sarah Gilman

How do we come to belong anywhere? One answer is that we find each other.

In stressful alpine environments, plants grow and reproduce better near other plants. Some animals, when threatened by predators, clump together in larger groups. Humans are among the most spectacularly social species on the planet, perhaps in part because the more cooperative among our ancestors were more likely to thrive in a difficult and dangerous world. Life is“not just a struggle for survival,” as mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak recently put it. “It is also, one might say, a snuggle for survival.”

And in Paonia, I began to piece together a sort of tribe — at work, at pickup ultimate Frisbee games. A new roommate quickly became a dear friend. An intern waded with me to an islanded bridge in the town’s flooded river to see the stars. A man asked me to dance at a bar, kept ahold of me the whole night, then surprised me with a kiss when I moved to leave.

My folks were right: These small accumulations of welcome can and do happen wherever we land, if given time. But with time, I also learned how different they can feel in a small town. In that ocean of open country, Paonia came to seem a sort of life raft — sharpening and clarifying the connections I had, and forging new ones I would never have had otherwise. The passengers aboard were who they were; I could not silo in only with people my age, my interests, my background. I still wandered in the hills, but my sense of hopeless drift stopped. These were the shoulders I could sleep on, the knees I could brace against. And I would not have chosen different ones.

The curly-haired clerk at the hardware store, a man in his 60s, let me split his firewood, more for the company than out of necessity. He made me lasagna in return, told me trails where I could see more moose, and showed me how to use a chainsaw so I could help him buck rounds from blown-down aspens on the mesa north of town. I fell in love with the rogue kisser from the bar — a talented carpenter who was as broken-hearted as he was dear. He took me swimming in the river, tattooed one of my drawings on his skin, invited me to hard-drinking parties with local kids who opened their doors to me as if I weren’t an outsider. One day, he showed up unannounced at my office, covered head to toe in concrete dust, and gave me a flower he’d twisted out of baling wire on his break.

There was the friend who hadn’t learned to read until he was a teenager, and yet could make his own biodiesel and fix anything, who never charged you what his labor was worth and always had wine and chocolate in his truck in case you wanted to watch a movie. The former large-animal vet who tenderly handled your pets and never charged enough, either. The volunteers who ran the ambulance service, ferrying wheezing old ladies 30 miles down the two-lane highway to the nearest hospital. The friends who hunted and shared their bounty. The single moms who watched each others’ kids. The head of the local environmental group who seemed to take on everyone else’s wounds — including mine, when my carpenter’s broken heart broke my own.

There was darkness in that bright place, too — alcoholism, drugs, deep political divides, crippling poverty, unacknowledged racism. People died or were terribly injured in drunk-driving accidents. During one quarrel, a man threatened his inebriated friend with a shotgun, accidentally firing it into his belly. An ugly divorce ended in a violent murder on the train tracks, just blocks from my house.

The night before that happened, the not-yet-murderer had bought drinks for some of my friends at the local brewery — a tiny former church that filled to standing-room-only on cold winter nights. It was a macabre twist on Paonia’s stewpot closeness: With so few places to gather, everyone went to the same places, the same potlucks, the same Thursday-night dance parties and concerts in the park.

It was not that these things were good, though they often were. It was that we craved their energy, craved other people: The emptiness around us pushed us into each other’s arms. Once there, I discovered just how many different kinds of people I could love — both for their weaknesses and their strengths.

Dukha nomads in a traditional teepee. Also known as the Tsaatan, the Dukha tend reindeer herds that provide food, clothing and transportation in northern Mongolia.

Art wolfe / Art Wolfe Stock

Jo and Sean visit the neighbors for bread and talk.

Sarah Gilman

Eventually, the light returns, first blue, then the same honeyed hue that lit Jo’s face the previous evening, turning each glossy willow leaf into a candle flame. Sean creaks up from our row of saddle pads and starts a new campfire at the edge of the forest. I follow its smoke down the hill past where Batdelger tends the horses, and fill the same plastic bottles from the same stream. We smile and nod our heads in greeting, and he follows me back to the others. There is the same rancid bread and Nutella, the same dried fruit and nuts. But things have shifted somehow. Today, we have the empty pea can, and I fill it with water and place it in the coals to boil, then brew black tea in my thermos. As the sun climbs, we pass it from hand to hand, each cradling it for a moment to warm our fingers, our faces. Then a long sip, and on to the next person. Outside our tiny circle of warmth, the taiga spreads away, gorgeous and aloof; inside, the long night’s chill melts from our bones.

The Dukha village, when we finally arrive, is like something from a dream. The lichen grows spongy and ankle deep. Canvas teepees called urts spread across the basin, and reindeer the color of snow and earth meander past errant satellite dishes, their tendons clicking over their anklebones like those of their caribou cousins. When it rains, people watch Korean soap operas. When it doesn’t, the kids stand in a circle outside listening to “Moves Like Jagger” and other pop music while punting a volleyball, or ride out on reindeer to herd the rest of the reindeer back to camp. The women milk the animals multiple times a day, using pails of the thick, white liquid for cheese and tea. They roll out their own noodles, make bread in the coals of their fires. The men throw guns on their backs and ride off for days. Their resourcefulness, their practical use of both tradition and tech, is both utterly foreign and strangely familiar.

Punsal, Batdelger’s wizened aunt, cackles over our shyness, our wide-eyed appraisal of the place, and, with the three of us sharing her extra bed, her own joking speculation about which of us women is the real wife. We carry water and cook for her, and she chain-smokes cigarettes rolled on pages torn from a book that Sean surmises is a Mongolian play. My birthday falls in that week, and after Jo and I have returned from a hike, Punsal taps me on the shoulder with a wide, toothless grin, and produces a bouquet of tiny orange poppies from behind her back. She gestures at the paperback I’m reading, then helps me spread each bloom between its pages with her shaking, deeply lined hands.

A couple of days later, Batdelger collects our horses at dawn to avoid another frigid campout. As we begin to ascend the steep pass that marks the beginning of our journey in reverse, I’m startled to find myself weeping. The taiga mountains, rolling away in broken waves toward Russia, bear a heartbreaking resemblance to the peaks that first called me into Colorado’s rural backwaters. This trip marks the end of my time there: In my last years in Paonia, I had realized that I was still on my way someplace else, though I wasn’t sure where. Once home in the U.S., I will try life in a big city, in a different state. The choice feels right, but the knowledge of what I will lose has suddenly cut through me like a knife.

Late that evening, as we pile into the Land Rover that will take us back to Murun, we are mostly quiet. Too exhausted and saddle-sore to contend with another night in an overfull van, we’ve paid the drivers enough to ensure that we have it to ourselves. Jo and Sean take one bench seat, I take another, and we toast each other with Tiger Beer, a weak, American-style lager that seems to fit this final surrender to our weak, Euro-American constitutions. I use mine to wash down a Dramamine tablet, and we retreat into our separate cubbies and ourselves.

As I float in a druggy stupor, I smile through the rear window at the long line of peaks, which cradle the sunset sky in their jagged fingers. But something still isn’t right, and at a petrol stop, we fix it. It takes only a few minutes to fold the back seats flat. Then, we curl up beside each other with Jo in the middle, and go to sleep at last.

A tourist ger complex in the western Mongolian province of Arkhangai.

Sarah Gilman

Sarah Gilman has plenty of awkward Dr. Fleischman moments in her new city of Portland, Oregon, where she is an HCN contributing editor and freelance writer. She was the magazine’s associate editor in Paonia, Colorado, for more than six years.